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.
@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 🙂
Pepijn
Raymond Russell
NormanDunbar