Comment Long ago hack (Score 2, Interesting) 874
Many years ago I was called on a Friday lunchtime by a very scared IT manager.
The computer that was running their organisation had been struck by lightning.
They offered me a lot of money to get the system up and running by monday 09.00.
Naturally I accepted the challenge and made my way to the site, it was unbelievable.
The lightning hadn't actual struck the computer, it had hit a power line 100 yards away, but the damage was incredible.
I thought he was joking when he said it had melted.
Well over the course of the weekend I managed to either build, repair, or source replacements for everything except the memory. It was now about 03.00 monday and I hadn't slept, eaten, or had a beer since about 12.00 Friday.
Fed up by now I hacked up a little serial interface and connected it to one of the tape drives that had survived the blast, man those things were tough, then created a little board on vero that took a memory address and serialised it. This was hacked into the system and I punched in the boot code.
10 minutes later, a monitor sprang to life.
Well when I say sprang, it more like oozed to life.
One character per second, you had to hold a key down until it appeared on screen then release it, but it was working.
Amazingly all their records had survived as well! ( found out later that all the tape drives were run off a seperate mains feed with a surge supressor, at least one engineer must have known what he was doing.)
They paid me off and ran like that for two days before they could get a replacement ram board.
The computer that was running their organisation had been struck by lightning.
They offered me a lot of money to get the system up and running by monday 09.00.
Naturally I accepted the challenge and made my way to the site, it was unbelievable.
The lightning hadn't actual struck the computer, it had hit a power line 100 yards away, but the damage was incredible.
I thought he was joking when he said it had melted.
Well over the course of the weekend I managed to either build, repair, or source replacements for everything except the memory. It was now about 03.00 monday and I hadn't slept, eaten, or had a beer since about 12.00 Friday.
Fed up by now I hacked up a little serial interface and connected it to one of the tape drives that had survived the blast, man those things were tough, then created a little board on vero that took a memory address and serialised it. This was hacked into the system and I punched in the boot code.
10 minutes later, a monitor sprang to life.
Well when I say sprang, it more like oozed to life.
One character per second, you had to hold a key down until it appeared on screen then release it, but it was working.
Amazingly all their records had survived as well! ( found out later that all the tape drives were run off a seperate mains feed with a surge supressor, at least one engineer must have known what he was doing.)
They paid me off and ran like that for two days before they could get a replacement ram board.
