Hi! Can we entertain each other with our fun stories about the oldest or weirdest tech we've come across?
Please boost for science or cows or something. TELL US YOUR COOL STORY!
edit: as suggested, adding the hashtag #WeirdOldTech to keep this stuff going a bit (hint: you can follow hashtags).
I'll start. It's the story that triggered this question :)
It's about the time a new technician at work did something stupid.
We received an industrial computer controlled machine with fire damage. Goal was to restore it to the state it had a seconds before the fire started.
The new tech got a simple task: disassemble the included PC (which only had minor smoke damage) and label the parts. Procedure is that we replace parts where it makes sense.
So he discarded the 3½-inch floppy drive.
1/3
FYI: we have good procedures, and peer checks etc etc. We also employ humans. And humans need to learn, and make mistakes.
To continue:
Our procedure on replacing parts has long been: store the old one for a year after project conclusion.
Our new tech just whacked it with a hammer before discarding it. He couldn't explain why.
Turns out it was something called a UHD 144 drive. It took a full day to find a new-old-stock one. At a cost of around 5000 euro. 🤭
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_UHD144
🤷
2/3
fallout:
-We still have the remains of the drive the tech whacked to death with a hammer. It's used during onboarding.
-tech has been happily working with us for many years. He's over the embarrassment (or acts that way).
-the client thought it was HILARIOUS. They also figured out a way to upgrade the system to work with SD cards 🙂.
-costs were 4800 euro. An exact 4000 for the drive, and 800 for "one-day delivery" (seller drove from DE to NL on a Sunday).
3/3
@Pepijn
That sounds vaguely familiar.
Back in the mid 2010's my boss had a minor panic when one of the main Japanese manufacturers announced the cessation of blank 3.5" floppy disk production. The DOS based CNC software we used wrote directly to floppys.
The solution was elegant.
Physically remove the floppy and remap the A: drive to a C:\ folder. One tech then wrote a Delphi program to copy the CNC code across the network to the industrial machines that used the code.
@raymierussell Nice. And much more practical as well :)
To be fair: I think the world will never run out of new-old-stock of these disks. There's SOOOO MUCH of it available.
@Pepijn
Ironically the biggest hurdle was actually a very minor change that slightly confused the machine operators.
I produced production plans with 2 digit numbers (it was actually the last 2 digits of a 4 digit number).
In the old way you could have 2 plans with the same number which was a not problem because CNC code on the disk was different.
The new way we used the full 4 digit plan number and it was suddenly an issue as it was "different". The operators soon got used to it.
@raymierussell It's always little things like that.
Many years ago I made the error of introducing a new way of versioning in our various documents.
It went from 1, 2, 3 ... 10, 11 ... 102, 103 etc. to R001, R002, R003 etc. With R meaning "revision" or even nothing at all.
Most people just got it and used it properly. Some people though decided this isn't right and started... versioning.
Years later we still have some documents with versions like R003-1, R003-version2, R003-V04 etc.
@NormanDunbar
"Modern" Turbo Pascal I am told.
With Lazarus being a FOSS cousin.
@raymierussell Yes indeed. I got involved a few years back, in building a Free Pascal cross compiler for the Sinclair QL.
It runs on a PC, compiles Pascal code to upload onto a QL.
For no good reason. 😉
@NormanDunbar
I loved Turbo Pascal back in my college days. Haven't been near it since then.
Z80 is my occasional coding indulgence these days.
Never seen a QL in RL 🙂
@raymierussell @NormanDunbar the QL is a perfect example of how Sir Clive could take a good idea, and make it a miserable experience in the pursuit of squeezing every farthing out of the bill of material costs.
It's going to have a 68K processor! Yay!!!
With an 8 bit data bus! Err..?
I really wanted to like mine, but the very clever, very unreliable microdrives were abysmal.
Regarding Pascal and Delphi - it bugged the heck out of C programmers that Pascal programs compiled faster and ran faster, before C compiler writers got their act together on optimisation 😆
@raymierussell True - it introduced huge numbers of people to programming who would never have had the opportunity otherwise, so that's officially a Good Thing.
I knew someone who worked at a company that cut keyboards of AIM65 computers with a hacksaw, so I took one and grafted it onto my young brother in law's Spectrum when its keyboard failed with multiple dead keys. Took me a while, I had to patch the board to match the required matrix.
Yeah, he wasn't happy, he wanted a new computer 😄
@AbramKedge @raymierussell Clive has a certain knack.....😉
To be fair, I used microdrives for years with very few problems. On my Spectrum too. Much more reliable than cassette tape!
Disc(s) would have been great but we're too costly back then I expect, for Clive anyway!
My emulator has a MC68020 now.
@AbramKedge @raymierussell Was that Easel? Part of the suite that Psion wrote?
Archive the database system.
Easel for graphics.
Quill for word processing.
Abacus was the spreadsheet.
And, you could export and import from one to another. Cutting edge stuff back then!
The Union at work used a QL to produce their newsletters for ages!
@raymierussell There are plenty of QL emulators available. I used QPC2 by Marcel Kilgus. It's for windows but I use it under Wine on Linux.
I taught myself Z80 assembly because I was crap at games on my ZX-81 and Spectrum and needed infinite lives or I'd be stuck on level 1. (I still couldn't get off level 1 😐)
@cazmockett o m g I actually read your story a great many years ago, way before we connected here!
Is he still doing it?
@autkin It's the "hardware in action" video I think? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GiY3nFFyJo
I'm amused that PTT RCD/ "witte muizen" would have kept checking the antennas, as surely they must have known what they were for, and PTT had some input into what satellites were around? maybe they still didn't trust your dad as just about *everyone* who had any knowledge of RF seemed to be building pirate transmitters (and some still are in NL and even occasionally across the North Sea in UK (we shared a lot of designs)
@jakobtougaard Health and safety officer here. I make a point of walking around with coffee cups in our electronic workshops. Unless there's a very delicate operation going on there's no real risk.
I was actually thinking how relatable everything in the photo is. At least two of our current techs could be starring in it (although they wouldn't have the plants).
When I worked on maintenance team for senior homes, we had this in one of the boiler rooms (I am short and the wire is exactly at neck height for me - so I always had to beware of it.
But there is good reason for it being present, there's a lead link at one end and a pulley and weight ; if a fire starts the lead would melt, and then the weight pulls down the lever and shuts off the gas supply to the building (to prevent gas feeding the blaze)
maybe because you *have* to keep an eye on it, and it encourages maintenance staff to check that its usable (and not block the wire with any items).
The same area is shared with the 400V three phase incoming service cable (which isn't as common nowadays - instead the gas and electricity supplies are in different parts of the building)
@Pepijn @vfrmedia What can happen to your OLE installation if you don't have such a system in place can be seen in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UiukIch79g
(Link found on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleifleiste )
@Pepijn Probably the oldest technology item I have personal experience with was a positive-ground Motorola tube- based two-way radio, older than I am (so pre-1964). This was back in my days as a radio technician, late 80s or very early 1990s.
The owner got mad when my employer cancelled the annual fixed-price maintenance contract. But we had no choice, because the last time we repaired it under the contract, the replacement component required was the last one. In the world.
@Pepijn Different story: from 2003-2005 I worked for a large junior college. One day I was the security rep accompanying an inspector of some kind (I forget who he worked for) and one of our network engineers in our main, very old, and small, data center. He notices a device in tge bottom of a rack. “Is that really a Bay Networks router?”
“Yup.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s part of the network core.”
At that point Bay Networks had not existed for over a decade.
Pepijn
mattdawhit
oheso
Raymond Russell
NormanDunbar
Abram Kedge🏴🇨🇦
Caz Mockett
Andriy Utkin
Tom Chadwin
Astrid
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Felix
JakobT
kravietz 🦇
geeeero
For Pete's Sake 
Anna Miriamsdochter
John Appel