The time we almost shipped tapes that would brick any machine it was installed on,
Posted by bwade913@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 40 comments
In the 80's I worked at an EDA company (Electronic Design Automation) where I specialized in the application tools that did place and route for printed circuit boards. As a headquarters applications engineer my day to day job was handling tech support cases for both customers and field applications engineers.
Back then, pre-internet we shipped software updates on 9-track tapes. The day before a new software update was set to release , I was asked by my manager to verify a bug fix before he hand carried a tape to one of our most important customers, a defense contractor in Dallas.
It was actually really hard to get my hands on a tape, because although I was in a senior tech support role, I'd never been in the position to try to acquire a pre-release tape before and the operations manager who didn't know me, so she made me grovel to get a tape. It was like "Who are you to demand a pre-release tape from me"? But I eventually got one, installed it on a machine and the machine then failed to boot. I went to the test department and borrowed another machine to test the tape, and it also failed to boot.
I've often thought about what I did next, I could have been diplomatic, gone to the test group and told them, "Hey, you might want to test this tape before we ship it tomorrow", so that they could handle it internally. Instead, I went to the test group and said, " WTF, you signed off on shipping a tape you didn't test at all!?!?" I made some enemies that day.
The alarm got raised and the shipment was halted. The next day, there was a printed memo on everyone's desk from the test manager entitled "The top ten reasons we almost shipped an untested tape". The operations manager stopped by my office to make sure I knew that she was "only kidding" when she made me grovel to get the tape.
I wish I'd kept that top ten list but the gist was, "We're overworked and who knew such a minor change could break the installation".
Sjsamdrake@reddit
In the 70s and 80s software distribution was by mailing out tapes. If a release was late it was kinda common to ship our blank tapes. It's take a week for customers to get the tape, and a while to try to use it. They'd then call in and complain, and the vendor would say "gosh sorry we'll send you another one". This would easily buy the team 2 weeks to finish the product.
proxpi@reddit
It's like the old classic trick of renaming a .jpg to .doc to submit homework, "oops sorry it's corrupted, let me resend it to you"
BrisingrAerowing@reddit
I know someone who did that and sent it to a professor who knew that trick. It didn't go how the student expected. The image the student sent was also furry p*rn. That didn't go over well.
W1ULH@reddit
dumbass... send the prof something that would make him chuckle if he figures it out.
bwade913@reddit (OP)
There was a hard disk drive manufacturer here in Colorado that got caught shipping bricks packaged as drives in order to commit an accounting fraud. This was back in the 80's.
hughk@reddit
The company was Quantum. It is a shame but they weren't manufacturing enough good drives to ship.
bwade913@reddit (OP)
It was MiniScribe that I was describing. Quantum was a big player eventually acquired by Maxtor.
WaytoomanyUIDs@reddit
Apparently Maxtor also bought rhe remains of MiniScribe after that boondoggle was exposed and they went bust.
ShalomRPh@reddit
Good grief. A blast from the past. I had a MiniScribe drive in one of my old computers. Weird form factor, IDE 3.5 inch full height, so it took up two bays. Maybe it had 40 megabytes of storage, I don’t remember.
bwade913@reddit (OP)
Sounds like an upgrade from the brick.
syntaxerror53@reddit
Brick HD Plus (like the 1.44Mb version of the 720K).
ShalomRPh@reddit
It was the size and weight of one, for sure.
insomsanity@reddit
I work at a company that services PCB machines. We still have some customers with working 40 year old laminators that still use the 8 track programs. There’s a box of tapes in our warehouse we have dust off every now and then.
unwisest_sage@reddit
I work for an ERP software company and we still have some legacy customers on AS400s we ship tapes too. I'm a younger end millennial and when I first started working here I had no idea such thing existed and I saw these ladies packing tapes and I was just like "wtf are you people doing?" And that's when I learned that we shipped upgrades on tape
dreaminginteal@reddit
My first employer had a problem with disk drive head crashes on the removable disk packs we used for some of the systems. A damaged read/write head would damage any disk it tried to interact with. Which would damaged the read/write head of the next unit it was placed into...
Eventually, they realized that the test disk, the one that they used to make sure that a drive worked again after the heads were replaced, was damaged and was damaging the newly-replaced heads when they were tested.
I'm glad that I was only there at the end of that process. I was also glad when we replaced those drives with something much more modern.
keloidoscope@reddit
I used to have a scored platter from a pack that had a head crash, until my wife badgered me into throwing it away. It took a couple of decades but we're divorced now. It was an early sign of what was to come...
grumpyoldtechie@reddit
Part of my first job was doing head alignment on those drives. The customer engineer (CE) disk pack used for alignment cost at least 10 times the price of a normal disk. The "big" 300MB disks had 19 heads. Aligning those were an absolute nightmare. One little push too hard on the torque screwdriver when tightening the heads and you had a ruined CE disk pack and head or heads. I liked the job but I really did not like working on those drives.
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
Oh yeah. Rebuilding one after a head crash wasn't fun. The one time I didn't purge overnight before putting it back into service caused it to crash again.
Fortunately, only one customer used only two drives for swapping packs (backup). So most of the drives we could skip alignment.
dreaminginteal@reddit
These were smaller--pretty sure they were single-platter drives.
A whole bunch of rabbit-holing later, I think they were RL02 drives! A mighty 10 MB of storage...
https://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/disk/rl-info.html
I remember the little device in that third photo. It was a stick-on piece of plastic that held a small glass ampoule that contained a red liquid. If the sticker were subjected to too much force (e.g., the platter housing was dropped) the glass parts would turn red.
MusicBrownies@reddit
"Rabbit-holing" - love it...
Oneota@reddit
Oh, so you worked on the Zip drive, then?
ShalomRPh@reddit
Click… click… click…
more_exercise@reddit
A Hardware Virus!
dreaminginteal@reddit
That is one of the ways we referred to it! The other ways were much less polite...
Phage0070@reddit
Sounds like a prion disease.
Less_Author9432@reddit
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣….😳😳wait, that’s not funny at all. More like terrifying!
Less_Author9432@reddit
🤦♂️when your “known good” test part is the cause of the problem. How many nasty messages were sent to the drive head supplier accusing them of sending defective products before someone clued in that the test process was at fault?
abrreddit@reddit
Plot twist: the company eventually became CrowdStrike.
bwade913@reddit (OP)
It's funny that you say that. I first told this story in response to the CrowdStrike debacle.
Fiveofthem@reddit
Blue, Red or Purple logo?
bwade913@reddit (OP)
Maroon!
Fiveofthem@reddit
Did 24 years at Purple starting in the 90s. Still shipping large drives even then.
ratsta@reddit
Surplus purchased from the studio that handled Spinal Tap, no doubt.
PendragonDaGreat@reddit
They're the same type of tape everyone imagines in a 70's mainframe with the vacuum loop and everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape
tashkiira@reddit
nah, those drives had bytes that were 8+1. the 1 was a parity bit. if the parity bit was off, you knew the data in that byte was damaged.
BlueJaysFeather@reddit
Good thing your manager had you check because apparently nobody else was. Good lord.
bwade913@reddit (OP)
9-track tape was the data storage standard of the time originated at IBM. Eight bit words plus a parity bit. It wasn’t a case of “This one goes to nine”!
GermanBlackbot@reddit
I think you replied to the wrong comment here!
ahazred8vt@reddit
I'd like to buy magnetic tape To store my data on. I'd like to know how much to store Before the room's all gone. https://shrope.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:id-like-to-buy-magnetic-tape&catid=9&Itemid=103
weirdal1968@reddit
I get wanting to be diplomatic but FFS sake those bozos would have bricked Very Important Things which would have been a resume stain for said bozos. Not privy to your govt contracts but don't they take such things Very Seriously Indeed?
The person who denied your access to the pre-release was almost certainly forced to "apologize". She sounds like a lovely person to avoid working with.
At least somebody admitted you saved the company from a huge rake->face.