Big network hardware company has a donation program for schools in the 1980s, and part of this pilot fish's job is following up with each school after a few months to see how things are going with the new equipment.
"One local school reported that our servers were failing 'because they couldn't handle 486-based computers.' which I knew to be untrue," says fish.
"I pressed for more information, and the school's representative said that when they connected more than 15 computers, the server would crash. I decided I wanted to see this in person. Rep suggested I bring along a tech from the workstation vendor so that we could all see exactly what the problem was.
"When we arrived at the school, they showed us how the server worked fine with 15 workstations attached, but when they added more, it crashed.
"Now, this was still in the days of coaxial cable networks. Turns out the workstation vendor had expanded the network with BNC connectors meant to be used for emergency repairs, and the huge number of those poor connections was more than the hardware on the server could take.
"It seems the workstation vendor also thought that, by blaming our server, they could sell some servers to the school as well.
"A week later, after the hardware vendor was forced to replace all the cabling with proper crimped cables, I checked back with the school -- and learned that everything was working perfectly."
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