After Three Weeks Of Night Shifts, Very Tired Techie Broke The UK's Phone Network
The Register, Monday, March 24th, 2025
And got away with it when someone else broke it even more comprehensively
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Wayne' who in the 1980s maintained the specialized 'System X' hardware that ran telephone exchanges.
Bad things happen when phone exchanges go down, so the System X machines Wayne maintained were installed in pairs named Processor 1 and Processor 0. Processor 1 was the active device and Processor 0 was the hot standby.
One evening, Wayne and his colleagues were asked to upgrade a major phone exchange that handled all the traffic for the North West of England and connected that region to the south of the country.