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

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

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.

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.