Skip this if off-subject stuff irritates you...just some Friday war stories.
Speaking of vibration testing...I remember back sometime in the 1970's we
had an intermittent storage director.
After a few SEV1 failures IBM would auto-escalate the support issue to page
somebody
and another guy in a suit would show up to handle the "people" aspects
and show their policy-dictated "concern". So after a long enough time the
room is full of people
trying different things...spraying freon on it, heat guns, cleaning
conectors, flicking their fingernails on discrete components,...but it
always works "until it suddenly doesn't" LOL. So after a while I hear
snippets of gibberish in a language-like IBM-part-number-ese: "... in a
BN-974645 logic scope won't .." "...66grg channel monitor can't..."
"...should we call in the big gun..." "...couldn't shoot this one with a
12-guage..." "...can't fit...in the elevator..." "...got a PN-9074539 right
in the truck..." "...mind the noise..." "...get it past security..."
Next thing I know, there's two guys in suits bringing in a long wooden 4 X 4
with a metal band on one end with an IBM part number stamped onto it, and
everyone grabs on, starts running wth it and swinging it and really banging
it hard against the frame of this storage director until it dies for good,
like a swat team knocking down a crackhouse door...then they replaced the
permanently-failed card and went home. I was dumbstruck that a four-by-four
would be employed often enough to have an IBM part number on it.
Long ago I went to High School with a guy named Tom Danley who once noticed
the sounds a computer tape drive made, and modified one such surplus capstan
motor with aramid belts wrapped around the capstan shaft to pull on
fiberglass cones, inventing the first rotary-motor-driven audio subwoofers.
The technology went full-circle when those Intersonics subwoofers were used
for earthquake drills and for vibration testing entire rooms full of
computer equipment.
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