Where is balance Academic priorities 264

Hey, I didn't write this narrative, it was a direct quote.

They evidently picked up the extinguisher prior to entering the room if one carefully parses the above text, so it was likely in the corridor.

Well, it's true that carbon soot will muck up the works, but this did not seem the problem here. As for your statements about the Chief's responsibility, I hardly think we can blame the Chief for a Cray he has no knowledge of. A manager of the facility, one of whose words I quoted above while he was attempting to deflect blame, should have had a standing arrangement with the local FD on how to respond to an alarm at such a costly and mission critical facility. The whole point of my post is to indicate how often such arrangements are only considered once the horses have left the barn.

It also serves as an object lesson in what dry chemical extinguishant will do to electronic devices...

Evidently IIRC there was an attempt to get SGI (this was after the Cray acquisition) to repair the system, but it was deemed beyond fixing since the dry chemical had corroded all the connectors, etc. inside the frame.

Kind of reminds me of the Honeywell 2040A "Scientific Unit" that we steamed to rest once when a pipe broke over the computer room on a weekend when the facility was unmanned. Due to compatibility issues over the course of software migration to a DPS8, we had one attached to the S2P "emulator" which was essentially a H200 CPU with the memory removed, the memory bus extended to the DPS8 SCU, and the clock driven through the diagnostic panel single step switch interface. Cool blinkenlights.

Anyway, the "Scientific Unit" was just a big boring blue box with a huge amount of wire wrap holding discrete and very early IC circuits. It was essentially a FP coprocessor, but was likely less powerful than an early 8087. The most stupid part of all was that the only reason we needed the damn thing was that some idiot had decreed that all the COBOL programs needed to have the pragma for the thing defined whether they used it or not, supposedly to "improve" performance.

We swore they had cleaned up the one we steamed to rest and returned it because the only source of unplanned outages with the DPS8 was that stupid thing throwing stray hardware interrupts. It was amusing watching the service folk probing the incredible mbutt of backplane wirewrap.