Don't press the big red buttom on the wall!

Wed Aug 31 04:06:13 UTC 2016

One day, when I ran the Harvard Chemistry computing facility, I was
greeted on my way in by panicked profs and grad students that the big
VMS VAX (8MB! two memory cabinets! we gave tours!) was behaving
strangely I forget what probably crawling.

A lot of its use was for long-running jobs, week plus, basically
inverting matrices.

So I lept into action, whipped off my heavy winter coat and tossed it
onto one of the big disk drives and wham the system just halted.

Static I guess. Came back ok. Problem solved.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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