Martin 53N 1W <ml_news@ddnospamddml1dd.co.uk.dd> wrote:

Dave Trapnell wrote:

f/fgeorge <ffgeorge@yourplace.com> wrote:

Berkeley had another power outage and is trying to figure out why.

[...]

The reason the CPU's were not affected was because they were
protected by Liebert motor-generators with big inertial
flywheels 

Yup. Those mechanical beasts are much more effective than the present 
day weedy battery-transistors-antisurge plastic UPS boxes.

Shame the flywheels are so big and heavy and noisy and require a 
fast-start generator for continued backup...

Not to mention the cooling...

They'll likely find something daft like a leaky kettle is tripping an 
earth-leakage breaker or some such.

I'm still pulling for rodents...

Anyone for a cup of tea?
... Click. All goes suddenly quiet and dark... (:-((

Regards,
Martin

I never heard the term "earth leakage breaker" before. Here
we call them GFI's. I think it stands for "Generally
F-something Irritating" or whatever. We couldn;t afford the
"fast start generator" at our site. Back then, battery
backup was inconceivable. They would have been the size of
buildings. I think they figured every dollar saved on that
twelve foot  aluminum wire cost about $20,000 in lost
productivity. 

At leat when our system went down it only affected a few
hundred to a few thousand users. Now it affects five million
or whatever. Some seem to be genuinely upset when they can't
get their workunits. Thank the stars for SetiGate (and the
others). There is probably more computing horsepower in that
closet than in our whole multi-building data center with 500
tons of cooling. I was hoping my somewhat lighthearted tale
would take off a bit of the edge. 

When I read _Neuromancer_ about fifteen years ago I realized
that even a huge data center many times the size of ours was
infinitesimal compared to a ubiquitous worldwide network of
data systems. I had never even heard of the Internet. Maybe
I had. I think in 1982 "the Internet" was a modem connected
to our 3705. They told me "it was for email or something".
There used to be a saying: "To err is human, to really screw
things up you need a computer". I wonder if anyone has
written an extention for the Internet?

I'll take that cup of tea now. ;-)