[Sussex] [OT] An old story...

[Trevor Marshall]

On Thursday 01 May 2003 16:02, Geoff Teale wrote:

> A long time ago, an old time UNIX guru told me the secret to good Sysadmin
> was to always mount a scratch monkey.  I never really understood that,
> until now, I just came across this story.

Uh-huh....

> It seems that there was a certain university that was doing	experiments
> in behavior modification in response to brain stimulation in primates. 
> They had this monkey with a number of electrodes embedded in it's brain
> that were hooked up to a PDP-11.  They had several programs that would
> stimulate different parts of the monkey's brain, and they had spent over a
> year training the monkey to respond to certain stimuli.
>
> Well, eventually the PDP developed problems, and field service was called
> in.  Due to some miscommunication, the field service representative was not
> informed of the delicacy of this particular setup, and the people running
> the experiment were not informed that field service was coming to fix the
> machine.  The FS representative then booted up a diagnostic system I/O
> exerciser.  After several minutes of gyrations, the monkey expired, its
> brain fied.
>
> The moral, of course, is "Always mount a scratch monkey."

There's the definitive version of this story in the Jargon File 
< http://catb.org/esr/jargon/htm >
and look up 'scratch monkey'.  And then look at a few more entries..

-- 
Trevor Marshall