Originally published at: Toyota factory shutdowns due to "insufficient disk space" | Boing Boing
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I used to work somewhere that did number crunching for Jaguar-Landrover at Longbridge. The software they used had been bodged together over decades. Somewhere in the million-odd lines of codes was a counter that overflowed every once in a while. Rather than attempting to debug the code, the custodians would just wait until the software failed, and rebooted the system.
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Happy to lend them some drive space. I’ve got the floppies around here somewhere.
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“shutdowns due to “insufficient disk space”
Me too, kiddo. Me too.
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I love how the data was both deleted AND organised. 
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They couldn’t run to their local Costco?
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Obligatory:
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I’ve still got one of these floating around in the closet somewhere. (SCSI version if I’m not mistaken).
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Hey! I’ve got some of those:
And then about 50 feet of a punch-tape program to convert any Gregorian calendar date to Julian (and vice versa, if I recall). Maybe that would help them?
ETA: Image without my reflection.
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Apparently the Boeing 787 could shutdown its AC power generators if powered up for 8 months straight. The fix was to “periodically deactivate the electrical system”. Yes, turn it off and on again.
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One of the systems I worked on had some weird memory overflow/buffer thing that happened periodically and would lock up the server. Since the company wasn’t going to migrate to a newer version of the server code (system was, well still is 6 years later) being moved to a newer corporate 3rd party solution they opted to just reboot the server every night. Kludge but it worked (and is still working).
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Ooh, nice! I was unable to snag any when they closed down the USAF base where I worked with them (Wang VS systems).
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The platters are from an old IBM mainframe (maybe a System 360?) that had been sitting in a corner for years because nobody wanted to dismantle it. I take them into elementary school classrooms and get the kids to try to guess what they are as part of a “History Discovery” lesson.
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Oh, great: By seeing that map image posted, now I’ve got the Yamada Denki jingle stuck in my head.
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They fixed it by getting a bigger server.
And maybe they could cool it with Fukushima water. /s
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I don’t know what’s up with Toyota these days. I still see Toyota new-car dealers with mostly empty lots while all of the other brands have lots full of cars for sale. Somehow, Toyota seems not to have recovered from the Covid supply-chain problems. They sure seem to have lost their way.
I have a punchtape of Carrier landing.
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This is extra embarrassing when you remember this is the company that literally invented a system where anyone on a production manufacturing line could pull a cord and stop everything if they saw a problem.
Yet nobody apparently listened to the IT department well before this happened.
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The prof for my Numerics lecture had a very nice collection of disasters due to bad numerics (mostly rounding errors caused by floating point arithmetic).
One example was the fire guidance computer for a missile defence system deployed in the gulf war. The timing calculations introduced a rounding error of a minuscule fraction of a second which, however, accumulated over runtime, such that after a week or so of continued operation, the fire commands were off by almost a second, such that the defence charges missed their targets, leading to casualties at a US fort. Solution: reboot the fire guidance computer every 48 hours.
Another example concerned a Norwegian oil platform which, due to bad numerics in FEM software, capsized while being towed from port to its destination, resulting in a loss of several million dollars.
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