[ih] Nit-picking an origin story

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

am innately curious about the ARPANET "The IMPs Lights Realiability Issue"
you mention here and wonder if some additional color could be elucidated to
the colorful story as to just HOW "the lights on the IMP panel being a
major source of outages" and specifically what "re-engineering" was
effectuated to ameliorate them from crashing the IMPs?

On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 7:22 AM Steve Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> ... Ben Barker has a colorful
> story about the lights on the IMP panel being a major source of outages.
> The IMPs had a 98% percent uptime at first.  98% was astonishingly good
> compared to other machines of the day, but intolerably poor in terms of
> providing an always available service.  Ben re-engineered the lights and
> brought the reliability up to 99.98%.  How's that for a small thing having
> a big effect!
>
>
-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True