Posts by Frogfather

Something similar

Something very like this happened when I worked at Scottish TV in Glasgow in the 90s except that the dump was caused by a techie working on the system crossing some contacts with his scope probe. The gas release is achieved by a small explosive device so yes, it would go Booooom!

In older times

I was at HW in the early 80s before cyberattacks were a thing. However, the Burroughs B6900 rose to the challenge by being down for most of first year. Maybe a valve burned out or something.

Brings back memories

I was a user of Mandrake/Mandriva for many years - the decision was kind of forced as I used Borland Kylix - an ill fated attempt to port Delphi to Linux - which was certified to run only on Mandrake 8.2 and RedHat ... er 7.something.

If I remember correctly there was some tie in with a publishing company so the distro came in a box with some installation disks and a large book. Mandrake 8.2 was on 3 cds, Mandriva 10 was on 6. I found them a couple of months ago during a clear out.

I stuck with it until Mandriva until there was a major hiatus and they sacked most of their devs (I think that's when Mageia became a thing) at which point I switched to Fedora. I'm not sure Shuttleworth was entirely to blame - most distros are free these days - but he probably hastened an inevitable decline.

Another breakdown

It was also stopped for a year around 1975 when a brake failed on the striking train causing the mechanism to disintegrate fairly violently.