[mogrith]

Ok here is one of mine.Now like all good Sea Stories this should start with 'This is a real No S&^ter': I was in the Navy in the late 70's to late 80's and I was stationed on 60's era sub that used to be a missile sub but had the missiles removed by treaty. One of the Missile Navigation computers was still in the Navigation Room.Forget Tape drive this thing had a Drum Memory. Fixed heads across a cylinder of magnetic media. The first few heads were read only for system boot to Core Memory the rest were R/W.The motor for the drum has a blown starting circuit and no repair parts left. So we clamped a lawn mower pullstart to the shaft. Pull the rope to get the drum moving apply power and it would spin up to speed and load.Only pullstart computer I ever saw.This was not a computer that any operational use Just something the Senior Chief rigged up out of boredom during a refit.

 

[lawman]

I used to do tech support at school and had a prof. call and insist that her modem (pronounced mo DEM, rather than MO dem) wasn't working. I tried to explain to her that there was an ethernet connection, and that she should be able do connect without a modem. She insisted I come and check. I get to her office and start looking, the computer's working fine, so I look at the back. No 10baseT cable, but there is a phone cord plugged in. WTF? I asked her if it had been working before, and she ran through a litany of unrelated ID10T program issues, when someone walked in and told her how nice her office looked. They ignored me and had a conversation where it came out she had rearranged her office, but her phone had something wrong. I asked what was wrong with the phone, and she told me the cord didn't fit... Sure enough, she had moved the desk with the computer, left the lan cable, plugged the phone into the tower, and tried to plug the lan into the phone. I pointed it out that the two weren't the same, and she got mad at me. I actually explained to her that this was a fairly common ID10T problem, and I could get a longer lan cable and longer phone cable and fix it. She thanked me and asked for a list of ID10T problems, and I had to actually leave I was laughing so far. This person teaches college students... seriously.