Eric Messelt wrote:
>
>  > Any volunteers?

Do stories from HP Employees count?  If so, here's my favorite:

The HP3000 lab is here in Cupertino, California.  We are always
testing our latest software, and one of our most rigorous tests
is our "reliability tests":  we take a pair of different HP3000
models networked together, and we run a variety of jobs on them
to maintaiin 100% CPU activity and high disk & networking
activity for 120 hours straight.  These reliability "rings" are
rarely inactive -- we are constantly pounding away on these
machines with workloads that are 'way out of spec from our
configuration guides.

In October, 1989 we experienced a significant (7.1) earthquake
in this area.  The HP buildings here on this site had varying
amounts of damage.  It seems that the newer the building, the
less damage was sustained.  One of our oldests buildings here
was condemned and was eventually torn down.  The building in
which I was working was one of the newer ones, and it sustained
little damaged.  The adjacent building was a bit older, and it
was closed for a few days while engineers checked it out -- our
reliability rings were in this building.

A friend of mine who worked in that older building called me to
request that I fax her a form from her desk.  Wearing the required
hard hat, I entered her building.  About a quarter of the ceiling
tiles were down, and I had to hunt for her desk -- it had wandered
about 10 feet away.  Before the earthquake, she had had flowers on
her desk -- during the earthquake, a drawer had opened, the flowers
were dumped in, and the drawer was closed.  The phone worked, so I
called her for directions to find her form.  She told me to look at
the vertical file on her desk, and I had to reply that there was
nothing vertical in the building any more.

Get the idea -- this earthquake was severe!  The machine room that
housed the HP3000s & the reliability ring was no better off.  If
you are running a good shop, your machine room is well laid out,
perhaps with your machines in near rows on a raised floor.  That
was our machine room before the earthquake.  Now, imagine that
10% of your raised floor collapsed.  Further, imagine that each
of your machines took a walk of up to 15 feet in a random direction.
Imagine that a couple of your disk drives fell over on its side.
Imagine that ceiling tiles and consoles fell.

Now imagine that the reliability ring was still running.



--
Jon Cohen
[log in to unmask]
Hewlett Packard -- Commercial Systems Division

(The opinions expressed here gotta be mine, 'cause no
one else will own up to 'em.)