The Blues and the Greens
Today has been a beautiful one, enough to persuade even me to visit the Big Blue Room. Some extensive rearrangement of the local greenery happened after Max lost one of his toys in a tree, and many scratches later I was able to relax in the knowledge of a section somewhat spruced up. That tree that blew down a couple of years ago has been appropriately dealt to, a drain has been uncovered, much moss, ivy and branches removed as well. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for similarly coloured skies, so the industry may even continue for another day!
In other blueness and greenness, when Fraser finally got dressed this morning he loudly proclaimed that he was "all in blue" so I said "Let's have some music to match, then" and we spent the first half of the day playing only tracks with names ending in "Blues", which sourced such a delightfully eclectic set of artists so that this afternoon we moved on and I found that music with the word "Green" in it's name might provided us with even more exotic entertainment to round out a great day of blues and greens. Tomorrow, Max says he wants to hear some Reds and Yellows, so I guess we will carry on there! I might cheat a little and leave the 'w' off yellow :-)
Big Red Switch
Andrew, somehow I feel you won't be offended by some gentle train-spotting. I came across your site by a circuitous route that doesn't really matter, and followed a thread from the Big Blue Room to the Big Red Switch.
I didn't start my DP (remember that's what we called it then?) career quite as early as you - I first cut my teeth on an IBM 370/125 - but I do recall that the big red switch was called an EPO. It means of course "Emergency Power Off" and while the earlier models may have had an Emergency Pull button it wasn't long before IBM invented a TLA for everything.
I only once saw the EPO button pulled - when the water cooling system on a 4300 series mainframe conked out and it was getting pretty hot. The IBM Systems Engineer (Glen McDonald if memory serves) came down from Queen Street in about 4 minutes flat, and spent the next 3 hours happily reconnecting all the EPO cables under the floor to the power switch of each device. Those were the days.