[ih] A small story of IMP #1 and the UCLA Computer Club

[Karl Auerbach]

This is a trivial, and quite irreverent, bit of Internet history....

I, like several others, were members of the UCLA computer club during 
the late 1960's.  The club's office was in Boelter Hall - not far from 
the room that held IMP #1 (and the Sigma computer - along with its 
"Sigma EXecutive" documentation, aka "SEX Manuals".  My project's 
computer, an IBM 7094 - with a true memory leak [the core memory was oil 
cooled, and that oil leaked] - was in the next room over and we could 
hear the squeals from the AM radio caused by the RF noise from the IMP 
and the Sigma.)

Anyway, folks in the Computer Club - especially Mark Kampe - kinda like 
to pull pranks.  For instance, we would drop things from the top of 
Boelter Hall (9 floors up) to see what would happen.  The landing zone 
was the collection of crunched and bent automobiles resulting from the 
early crash-tests of my group, the Institute of Traffic and Traffic 
Engineering.  We dropped everything from frozen superballs to a lead 
container used to hold/transport radioactive materials [it was empty].  
There was also a feisty ice-cream vending machine in the hallway that 
once-too-often failed to deliver the paid-for frozen treat - so someone 
in the club unplugged the machine for a few hours, everything inside 
melted, and then plugged it back in, re-frezzing the leaking drippy 
mess.  That was not nice, but it was - here's a terrible pun - that 
vending machine received its just desserts.

Anyway, back to Internet History...

IMP #1 had the rough appearance of an armor plated refrigerator, with 
lifting lugs on the top.  The machine was "ruggedized".

That word, ruggedized, was like honey to ants - it seriously caught our 
attention.  So we (I think Mark K. in particular) asked "Is it rugged 
enough to survive a drop from the top of Boelter Hall?".

So our imaginations lit up with images of us grabbing IMP #1, hauling it 
up to the roof and dropping it into the crashed cars nine floors below.

Obviously, prudence and sanity - and perhaps even some, probably 
reluctant, respect for law - prevailed.  We never did get beyond the 
"what if we did this" stage.

(But a couple of years later some of us migrated from UCLA to SDC in 
Santa Monica.  At SDC we had an extremely awful HP 2000 minicomputer 
that, if I remember properly, did actually suffer such a fate as it was 
dropped it from the roof of the Q7A building - three stories tall - onto 
the parking lot - a fate that all of us applauded. [It was truly a 
terrible machine with an even worse operating system.]  Some of use, 
years later, moved onto the Interop show nets were we sometime had to 
practice the delicate art of percussive maintenance.)

         --karl--