
The First Computers in East Africa and what became of them (2015) - rbanffy
http://owaahh.com/the-first-computers-in-east-africa-and-what-became-of-them/
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sevensor
Fascinating story -- the vacuum tubes in the computer drew so much current
when it was switched on, that they had to wait for the bakery down the street
to turn off its ovens before they powered the computer on for the day.
Otherwise they'd blow up a transformer.

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rbanffy
I once had a bug report where a client was having boot failures seemingly at
random - machines would not come up and be detected by the management
software. It turned out they were powering up all machines at the same time
and that caused a low voltage on the power rail.

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walrus01
On big servers (4RU, quad socket xeon size), BIOS features exist specifically
to deal with this in electricity outage situations. Most people will leave the
option set to "last state" for power recovery, meaning that after total loss
of AC power, the server will attempt to return itself to the last operating
state, typically on. Problem is when you have dozens of such servers, the
inrush current if they all try to power on at once is huge. So there's a
second BIOS option, allowing you to set a custom time-delay between return of
AC power and when the system attempts to start, or to choose a random start
delay between 1 and 30 seconds so that a whole series of machines don't all
try to start at precisely the same time.

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sevensor
I don't know how data centers are set up, so this is a comment made in
ignorance: I'm surprised this isn't built into the electrical service for the
rack.

Only distantly related: I kept tripping a breaker in my kitchen while making
breakfast. It took me the longest time to figure out that I could run my
toaster and coffeemaker at the same time, but if the fridge compressor kicked
on while I was doing that, it would overload the circuit. It took me so long
to figure out what was going on because I was always dealing with this
situation before I'd had my coffee.

~~~
rbanffy
The solution, as always, is to have more coffee. Had you increased the odds of
having all three on, by having more coffee, you'd be able to observe it with a
chemically alert brain.

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Itaxpica
The snake story deserves to be up there with Hopper's moth in the annals of CS
history

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purplezooey
_Long before C, Python and Horde,

A big computer was tipped overboard._

