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From Pat Armstrong we have the story proving that the "Dirty Bit Bucket" should be used:
In the winter of 1977 I was working on a MIT 133 in the factory at MDC Long Beach CA. I found that a mouse had gotten into the unit to keep warm.
Mister mouse had done what mice do to electronics. He had eaten the covering of the wires and deposited 30 or 40 small cylindrical, football shaped, brown
objects to pay for the "Rent."
Back then when we fixed a unit we had to return defective parts to Sunnyvale so the factory could repair or identify the cause of a failure. Me being
a good CE I put the "Rent" into a reject envelope and labeled it with: "Can't ID this part, Please advise".
Several weeks latter I got a interoffice memo with a part number for
what was called "Computer Bits". I knew I had to order them. I got my mouse droppings back.
Keezer Cuffs?????????????????????? I would hope so.
I was the SE for Hillrom from 1982-1984. The second year I was working on a database problem, and, forgetting I was not in the lab, started deleting
a production datafile. It created a major crisis, but one of the good things from it was it caused the customer to see the value of disc rather than tape
backup on a standalone disc system. From that time for the next year there were comments about "Keezer cuffs" being on the bulletin board in the computer room, to keep me from pushing buttons.
I redeemed myself when they managed to create a tape that lost the parity in the header. No matter what they did on the mainframe side they couldn't
read it. I still happened to have a general purpose dataset sitting on the disc processor. I patched mag-tape to bypass the parity check and read the
tape onto disc. I then unpatched mag tape and rewrote the tape with correct parity. It worked, and I was no longer threatened with hand-cuffs.
Bill Keezer
The first DPI system shipment and payment was so smooth!!!!????
In the fall of 1966 we shipped a system to Globe Union in Milwaukee for trial and demo. We were testing right up till it was put on the truck. When
Dave Lowe installed it in Milwaukee, turned on power, and pressed RUN, the program was still there. Non-volatile memory. But they did not buy the system.
Later that winter we had our first firm order and shipped to GE in Bloomington, IL.
Unfortunately, the truck hit a snowbank in Nebraska and destroyed the equipment. Globe Union lost their demo to cover GE.
While there are lots of stories about this installation, I will skip to the BIG DAY when the first actual revenue arrived in June. As Jim Musser
was opening the front door to go into work on a Saturday, he found the mail on the front step. There was an envelope with a check from GE to DPI for $125,000.
An early advertisement for a Field Engineer to be assigned at Avondale Shipyards.
