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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

> they told me that one time they let it go so far that it pulled its own cable out of the plug

Not sure I believe this story as IBM channel cables have a big ass screw in the center that is used to make sure they don't come loose. I can't remember if it's even possible to fully seat the connector without tightening the screw but certainly it was not a practice to leave it undone.

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There is another story there about someone writing assembler program calculating 50000! for a DEC PDP-10. The PDP-10's registers are memory mapped to locations 0..15, so you could write a program that ran entirely from the registers. According to the story the registers (which were TTL) overheated and died.

I'm old enough to have programmed a PDP-10 when I was at Uni, and yeah once you grok'ed the architecture writing a program that ran in the registers is a challenge you set yourself. Mine computed primes using a sieve. It didn't kill anything.

A person of my acquaintance owned a PDP-10 which he had in his apartment. Originally he had no memory for it and could only run programs from the registers and I remember thinking how strange that was.

I heard of a story that a Drum-drive started walking until it touted a table (over night).

There is also another story i think from DEC, that there was a Company who had like 10x more head-crashes (always on the same day), bit later they found out is was the Lorry who delivered goods one floor below.

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