Enjoy. Perhaps we can start a thread reminiscing about how our HP3000s
performed above and beyond the call of duty,
John

That Indestructible Black Box: A Testimonial (copied from MC Midrange
9/16/03)

It was a warm spring day in early May. I was with Jon Paris and Susan
Gantner at the first RPG World conference in Orlando when my daughter
Chrissy called me from home. The call went something like this:

"Dad! Last night, Casey [our dog] came upstairs to my room at 3:00 a.m. and
woke me up," Chrissy said. In my house, the dog never comes upstairs to
where the bedrooms are. She's been trained well and knows better. In fact,
if we stand at the top of the stairs and call her, she will not come up the
stairs. So for her to have gone upstairs and woken up my daughter was very
strange. I figured the dog must have desperately needed to go outside.
Then, Chrissy continued, "I followed her downstairs and discovered the power
was out. Casey went over to the basement stairs and barked." At this point,
I'm thinking Lassie. When Chrissy said the power was out, I knew what was
coming next.

"There was at least 8 inches of water downstairs; the basement was flooded!"
she exclaimed. At that point, I started to worry that perhaps the water
heater was pumping natural gas into the house or something like that.

Then she said, "The water was halfway up the side of your black computer,"
and I realized the reason for her concerned tone. My AS/400 was sitting on
the basement floor, plugged in, and in nearly a foot of water.

My daughter continued, "I unplugged it, picked it up, and put it on top of
the plastic bins in the basement so the water can't get to it now, but water
was pouring out of it when I moved it."

I thanked her and told her she did a good job (she is a police officer after
all, so thinking clearly in a crisis is part of her training), and I went
back to RPG World. Needless to say, I had little hope of being able to
recover the system.

Upon returning home a few days later, I inspected the system and indeed did
see a water line just a few inches below the white IPL button. If figured
there was no way this box was ever going to work again. After all, who knows
how long it actually sat in the water before the dog woke my daughter?

In college (about a hundred years ago), Electrical Engineering was my major
while I was learning computer programming. So, pretending like I still
remember something from those electronics courses, I made a decision to not
power on the system for a little while. I wanted to give it time to dry out
thoroughly. That "little while" turned into months. Recently, on a lazy
weekend day, I went downstairs and moved the system off the bins and
returned it to its original position. I decided to plug it in and try to IPL
the system, all the while knowing it would never start up properly.

I plugged it in. The little yellow LCD panel light up. So far so good! Then,
I pressed the little white IPL button and watched the machine begin doing
its thing. At that point, I wondered how long it would be before I need to
call Al Barsa and ask him what the SRC code was that was being displayed on
my IPL panel. Incredibly, I never had to make that call. In fact, that damn
machine IPLed like it had for the last seven years. I did a quick test of a
few applications to make sure it was working and then started a full system
backup. Everything completed normally! Now, the system is not only fully
backed up, but it is actually working like the first day it arrived.

Bob Cozzi has been programming in RPG since 1978. Since then, he has written
many articles and several books, including The Modern RPG Language --the
most widely used RPG reference manual in the world. Bob is also a very
popular speaker at industry events such as RPG World and is the author of
his own Web site, www.rpgiv.com, and of the RPG ToolKit, an add-on library
for RPG IV programmers.

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