For What Its Worth
Computing stories, The Demo
In the days when CAD systems ran on Mini Mainframes we had a demo for the CEO of a large company. I suggested we show displays of finished products with the dollar amount saved on the screen. Very basic and very CEO oriented. The head tech manager of the time opted for a demo that in 1.5 minutes would show the process of art to part. We applied the old rule of thumb, the less time you have the more prep you need.The demo was well constructed and very taxing on the system. The engineer was really worried about screwing it up. So they practiced over and over. Everything was going perfect. The CEO came in and they started. About 22 seconds into the Demo the system hung tight and would not recover, period. No backup plan, nada. The CEO was impressed alright, enough to ignore funding requests for expansion for a while to come.
After rebooting and digging into the demo the problem was found. The trace file had been enabled. As they practiced over and over they slowly filled up the disc drive until it hit %100 full, right in the middle of the demo.
