I got a raised computer floor...

Hmmm... brings back some memories.

Back in the '70's the company I worked for used Datapoint mini-computers (16 MB of RAM, gigantic (the size of a two-droor filing cabinet) 5 MB disk drives, so reliable they would sometimes run as much as two weeks before requiring service) and the service technician told a story of a large computer installation he worked on that had a raised floor.

He serviced the machinery, everything worked great, he turned out the lights and left... only to find a message waiting for hem when he got back to his office: the system was down. He went back, checked everything out, all was working just fine. So he left again, only to be called back yet again.

Turns out that there was a cable running under the floor making a bad connection -- but whenever somebody was in the room, the weight of the person would cause enough flex in the raised floor to tension the cable and cause the connection to "make". As soon as he left, no more data transfer.

That Datapoint was the damndest thing... It was on one side of the room, my metal desk at the opposite side. If I rolled my chair across the room, from the computer over to my desk, if the chair touched my desk (which in no way was connected to the computer which was about six feet away) at least 80% of the time the disk drive would spin down and I'd lose all unsaved data and have to reboot the system.

I was never able to figure that one out.

tanstaafl.