3.617 Quaky Notes and Queries from California (41)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Fri, 20 Oct 89 21:34:42 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 617. Friday, 20 Oct 1989.
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 89 10:21:04 PDT
From: mbb@sittingduck.Stanford.EDU (Malcolm Brown)
Subject: PCs and Macs survive the great quake
It may interest the HUMANIST readership to know that
nearly all our computing equipment made it through
the recent earthquake. Almost all of our desktop machines,
hard disks and all, survived.
The earthquake struck at 5:04pm local time, a time
when most of our machines are still running.
My computer group is perched in the 3rd floor of a
4 floor building, so we experienced considerable
swaying and rocking. Books were thrown off shelves,
bookshelves were knocked down, and heavy filing cabinets
"walked" away from walls. So far, however, none of the machines
have lost their hard disks due to head crashes, even though
some of them were knocked about by falling books and manuals.
No one was injured in our builing; our main casuality was a
laserwriter that was flung off a table top and is now
no longer with us.
Curiously, many of the MacII monitors pitched off their
swivel stands, but all seem to have survived the crash.
I suppose one may conclude that our desktop machines might
be less fragile than we sometimes suppose. Nevertheless,
that's one type of "field testing" I'm not particularly eager
to repeat!
Malcolm Brown
Stanford University