Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

ON CALL Every IT pro has a story filed away about the time they were asked to provide tech support under odd circumstances, which is why each Friday The Register brings you one such story in a fresh installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that celebrates odd circumstances.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Emmett" who taught us something new by sending us a story about the time in the early 1980s when he worked on a machine made by a British company called "Trivector".

Despite The Register being very fond of British retro-tech, it appears we have never mentioned Trivector in our long and storied history. We did manage to dredge up this ad for it in the Financial Times, circa 1982.

Emmett told us the Trivector he worked on was acquired thanks to a UK government programme called IT82 that encouraged small business to adopt computing.

IT82 was totally a thing and was named for the year 1982 – a grand one for the British tech scene. It saw the debut of Sinclair's legendary ZX Spectrum.

Emmett's employer developed medical practice management software that produced the very first printed prescriptions. One of Emmett's clients ran that software on a Trivector that had been acquired under the IT82 program.

Emmett described the computer as "a magnificent beast … about the size of a roller suitcase just a bit too large to carry onto an aircraft, and way too heavy to lift into an overhead locker. It had a single terminal and printer attached and was backed up and updated by old fashioned floppy disks."

The machine also had a hard disk – and at one of Emmett's clients that component kept breaking.

"Trivector sent an engineer to replace the disk three times, and the client was getting very tetchy," he told On Call. "So I was sent from our office in London to investigate."

This was no simple journey. The client was in the city of Belfast, then beset by the Troubles, the decades of conflict in Northern Ireland during the 20th century.

"It was not a place to visit as a tourist," Emmett wrote, and English folk such as himself didn't always feel welcome. When his rental car was checked for explosives on his way into a hotel carpark, his nervousness escalated.

He eventually found the client's surgery, in a tastefully converted Edwardian town house that featured dark-stained bare floorboards.

There, Emmett found the Trivector – on the floor, under a desk that was nestled against a wall.

"It didn't take long to identify the problem," he told On Call. "Across the room was a bank of filing cabinets housing the patient records which were accessed every time a patient came for an appointment."

As Emmett surveyed the situation, he noticed that every time a file was retrieved from a filing cabinet, the drawer slammed shut and caused the floorboard on which it rested to jump into the air.

The Trivector sat at the other end of the room – on the same floorboard.

"In those days, hard disks were very sensitive – movement and vibration had to be avoided at all costs," Emmett pointed out. It was therefore unsurprising that the Trivector proved troublesome.

"The solution was simple: I got them to move the computer to an area with a solid floor," Emmett told On Call. The client complied, the problem went away, and Emmett made it home safely.

What's the strangest cause of computer errors you've encountered, and how did you fix it? Click here to send On Call your story so we can feature it on a future Friday. ®