Computer problem

[Jedi_Outcast]

cool! (pun intended)

any idea how the cpu fan got unplugged?

 

[Jedi_Outcast]

that should never have caused that exact error message but glad its fixed

it will if the command.com get corrupted in RAM or the cpu cache. or if the IDE timing/controller is off.

I've seen heat do some real funky stuff to computers

what the command.com error means is that it found the basic startup files io.sys and msdos.sys, but that it can't find command.com or the file is trashed. I get that all the time if I screw up my path statements.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

I've seen heat do some real funky stuff to computers

Yep. In the old days before IDE, I was working for one of the big names in Voice Mail systems, and we had these phsyically large 500 MB ST506/512 drives. Full height, put out a lot of heat, but it was cool as hell that we had a whole 1 GB of drive space in one computer!

These were in the days when such large hard drives had a lot of mapped hard errors on them, and when low-level formatting you had to enter each and every address for the errors. We were always loosing the papers the errors were printed on so some smart guy decided that it would be really smart to stuff the papers in between these two full height heat monster hard drives. One day we started have hard drive corruption big time and people were losing voice mails left and right. Imagine my surprise when I pulled the computer apart and found those papers stuffed in there! It was lucky it didn't start a fire!

I was up until midnight fixing the mess, and we lost about a third of the voice mails on the system, but it was up and running the next day. This was on the company voice mail system, so it was very embaressing to have our own product go down.

 

[Jedi_Outcast]

lucent definity systems?

I rember those, shocked the shit out of me to find it was a 486 out back with a bunch of cards in it

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

lucent definity systems?

I rember those, shocked the shit out of me to find it was a 486 out back with a bunch of cards in it

Actually I believe Lucent bought and relabeled some of our systems - a lot of the big names did. I am not going to say which company I worked for as that might give some people a clue to who I am - if they knew me, but yes, many of the systems were PCs with Dialogic cards in the back end. Each of those cards were $2k plus unless you bought them in bulk, and they each had about 12 ports on them. What you were really buying is the software - ours was one of the best and most reliable, while still being much cheaper than the systems the big names like Lucent. One of the keys to making it with voice mail is the integration with the phone systems, and that is not easily done.

We used 486s when 486s were state of the art, but they weren't your standard desktop PC - they were these rack or tower systems with 10-20 ISA slots. A few of the low end systems were desktop systems but most were server grade systems. Nowadays I don't know what they use, but it is probably a PC with a lot of slots. The cards are pretty hi-tech with at least one DSP processor each, and the software had to be pretty close to real time with very little latency. A P4 with NT or Linux and a SCSI drive could easily handle the tasks, but the software is still what makes the difference.