30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
scratch monkey
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n. As in Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey , a
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proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or
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devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any
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risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that
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might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the
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Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the
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University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary
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monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing
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through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures
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on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC
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field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX
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inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.
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It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer
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sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter
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called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, Can
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you swim? Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of
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the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain
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clueless droid s at the local humane society. The moral is clear: When in
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doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. [The actual incident occured in 1979
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or 1980. There is a version of this story, complete with reported dialogue
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between one of the project people and DEC field service, that has been
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circulating on Internet since 1986. It is hilarious and mythic, but gets
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some facts wrong. For example, it reports the machine as a PDP-11 and
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alleges that Mabel's demise occurred when DEC PM ed the machine. Earlier
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versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has been corrected
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from an interview with the hapless sysop.
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