midnight251

I wrote this in December 1987 while working late one night during a PM that DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) was doing on our PDP 11/70 system. Those PM's took hours to do. This is when they had to use oscilloscopes to align the heads on your disk drives. For those old timers in the IT industry out there, you'll know what I'm taking about.

`Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the site
Not a batch job was running
Not even a byte.

When all of a sudden
From inside the room
Came a terrible crash,
A big bang then a boom.

I flew from my chair
To see what was loose
And saw pieces of read/write head flying
Like shit through a goose.

And what should I see
Through the flying fragment
But a jolly old fat man
With a hundred pound magnet.

I tried to call DEC
To tell them what was up,
And when I got through
They all thought I was nuts.

As I turned around
To see my plight,
He flew up the air conditioner
And out of sight.

And all I could hear
Through the hollow pipes
Was “Merry Christmas to all,
And to all a good night”.

I went to sit down
To try to relax,
When I was almost blinded
By one big flash.

When the smoke cleared
And the lights came back,
There in the computer room
Was a brand new VAX.

I looked out the window
And into the night,
And saw the jolly old fat man
With eight reindeer in flight.

I threw open the window
And with all my might,
Yelled “Merry Christmas to all,
And to all a good night”.


Mike Brown, Christmas 1987…

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blatant

Nice!

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