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To: The Antiyuppie
Let's see ~ we stuff the protons over here and the electrons over there, and when we have catastrophic failure all this stuff discharges all over the place ...... and goes to ground eh!(?)

I had to start getting real interested in this stuff about 18 years ago when our shop moved into an office building on the next to top floor where the top floor had a Faraday Cage construction throughout (for testing Space Shuttle parts). The Sun toked up a bit, spewed out all sorts of stuff, and sure as shooting every day how many ever minutes it took after Sunup for extra charge to hit that building, that's when my computer system cabling would pick up "static".

Oh, yeah, just ordinary static ~ but in a DEC system that's all it took to destroy connectivity. We tried all sorts of shielding ~ then we finally realized that the electric charge buildup on the Faraday Cage surface was actually a FLOW, and it was discharging into the metal pipes that served the heat exchanger for the AC in the computer room.

The solution was "pray for rain".

7 posted on 03/17/2012 8:24:01 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah
Over 30 years ago, we all had 8085-based machines. One manager's office abutted the Ladies Room. Quite often you'd her an exclaimed profanity from her office, indicating that her machine had reset.

The cause was tracked to static generated by the removal of a paper towel from the dispenser on the shared wall.

I could spin 180 degrees from my desk to my PC, and either have it reset, or cause problems for the machine next to my desk just by having my metal watchband touch the metal table.

I'd buy (and expense) static guard and spray every now and then.

10 posted on 03/17/2012 9:18:37 AM PDT by Calvin Locke
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