IT Manager Approved Downtime Over Lunch, But Made A Meal Of It
The Register, Monday, April 13th, 2026
Optimism is always risky, and defective hardware makes it indigestible
The best part of the working day is lunchtime, but The Register tries to start Mondays in a pleasant fashion by bringing you a new installment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your mistakes and detail your escapes.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Hugh" who in the early 1990s served as IT manager for a distribution company in Canada.
"The core line of business application ran on serial terminals from an SCO server," he told The Register.
At the time, RAID was a new and expensive technology. Hugh was therefore happy to use just one disk drive and a resilience regime that relied on nightly tape backups.