Engineer Sabotaged Hardware Then Complained When It Didn't Work
The Register, Friday, March 27th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ewen" who told us that in the early 1990s he worked for a company that made fiber-optic devices that sound like serious pieces of kit.
"Readings were taken continuously across 600-plus outputs by a sensor on a two-axis grid, driven by stepper motors," Ewen explained. "The motor controller was a full-length ISA board, as was the data acquisition board. We subjected them to a rigorous quality control process, including a long period of time in a climate chamber."
All the stuff Ewen's company made, plus a network controller, ended up in a tower PC case. "I believe the CPU was a 486 DX2 66 MHz," he said.