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IT nightmares: the hot zone

Back in the mists of time -- OK, the late 1980s -- I was working in tech support for a minicomputer manufacturer. (Readers under 40: ask your parents what a minicomputer was.) One of our new clients was having persistent problems with disk corruption and data loss, which was baffling all of us because our machines were famously robust, even in electrically noisy industrial environments. Eventually, the higher-ups decided that a site visit was called for, so as the most junior person on the team, I was pried loose from my terminal and dispatched.

I arrived at the customer location and was greeted in the lobby by my contact. "You'll need to remove your shoes and put these on", he told me, handing me white overshoes, hooded overalls, and surgical gloves. "The computer is in the Clean Room", he added. Now I was even more confused: my first guess had been a dirty environment causing disk heads to foul -- in those days, the gap between heads and disks was so large that dust could mean disaster, and smoking around disk drives was an absolute no-no. But in a clean room?

So dressed up like doomed extras from a plague movie on the SyFy channel we passed through a positive pressure airlock into a modestly sized lab that looked as computer-safe as you could possibly wish. A few of our minis sat on benches around the room, floppy disks shelved alongside them. Small, anonymous capsules about the size of a medicine bottle sat on top of the computers and disk boxes.

"So, what do you do here?", I asked out of curiosity.

"We make radioactive materials for medical work. Tracers, and so on. In here we do we calibration checks on samples."

"Uh, these little bottles are radioactive?", I stuttered.

"Only mildly", he smiled. "Don't worry, we scan you on the way out just in case. Why?", he asked, picking up one of the bit-killer-emitter bottles from the top of the disk box and setting it down on an eight inch floppy disk that was lying on the bench. "Is that a problem?".