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Skep's Pick: The IT Skeptic Awards for 2008 This link is here because...(hover)

Legends of IT: tall tales and true from IT's legendary past




Introducing a new series of posts:

The Legends of IT, written by you.

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The computer that sang to its operators

Legend submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2008-08-28 21:54. [nid:1104]

Here's the story told to me by one who was "really there", about the computer that sang to its operators.

The chair

Legend submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2008-09-11 09:14. [nid:1092]

Colleagues of mine did a benchmark demonstration to a prospective client. For reasons that I have lost in the mists of time, they were in a room in IBM's building, even though IBM were a competitor. As a result we had to supply all our own gear, so they brought in box after box of monitors and other equipment (probably not servers, this was a LOOONG time ago). Giff had a dodgy back so he had his own special chair too.

Just a minute

Legend submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2008-08-25 22:59. [nid:1089]

We were demoing a database product. It wasn't our product - we were the local agents for it in a far away country. We had spent a week of twenty-hour days setting up a system to their specifications on the client's VSE mainframe (a baby IBM machine compared to the OS370 brutes) - what we used to call a "benchmark" demo.

Now on the Friday the big bosses had come down to see. And one of them thought he had us nailed.