OSI C4P Can save but not load from tape

[larryw]

That is... bizarre. I would have thought light exposure would be more likely to wipe the thing. That's like my mouse issue with my Lisa proving to be a single pin that wasn't making a good connection with the original mouse. Since when do PETs use EPROMs? Or was this some kind of add on?

That reminds me of my mainframe days. I was working in a primarily IBM 370 DOS/VSE shop converting the company product to run on MVS. They gave me the mainframe literally for 1 hour every day at 4 PM to bring up MVS and of course, they wouldn't even begin to shut down the DOS/VSE system until 3:59 pm so my actual run-time was closer to about 30 minutes. Then one day the DOS/VSE system would CRASH somewhere after 3 PM. They started to think that I was hacking the DOS system to force them off. They finally allowed me to bring in an IBM SE to figure it out - he found a hairline crack in a motherboard that would heat up enough to expand and fail after running for 10 hours or so

A follow-on story to that is my conversation with the SE when I saw his invoice (at that time out of MY budget) and what a different engineer had also said to me which I've never forgotten.