You must log in or register to comment.
From http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
This story lives in my head forever as a perfect example of everything pointing to a theoretical answer but reality not caring.
The alternative explanation is immediately where I jumped to halfway through the story, though of course one pin would have to be contacting the metal body somehow.
Or, otherwise, it was forced into being a really cruddy capacitor …
I’m amazed that an “MIT lab” doesn’t have access to a volt-ohm meter
Audiophile is a misnomer because what they love is the equipment, not the music. Technophile would be more apt. (and it could apply to the identical condition in 10,000 different hobbies).
The sommeliers of the technology world. The perfect storm of electric hypochondria and placebo-gooning.
As with most things, there’s a kernel of truth in amongst the dross. You will have a nicer time with a set of £70 headphones than with a £3.99 set. You will have a nicer time with a FLAC file than a 64kbps MP3 of the same song. But there’s a very low ceiling of improvement that both physics and physiology will prevent you from surpassing. Maybe in the future with brain implants and shit like that we can start ramping up the fidelity of our listening abilities, but until then, you’re just trickling an ocean through a literal bottleneck and insisting you’re drowning in it.
Just listen to the damn music.
Disagree - you should hear these cables.
No thanks, I’ll keep using my coat hangers
Lmao
Good gauge wire, if you clean the coating off for good contact. Short too which reduces resistance. Therefore short, bare, and thick is better
Yeah it’s just that coat hangers usually are not made of materials that are the best for electrical wires.
cracks XLR cable like a whip
Real men ground their sound systems at the POSITIVE pin! Don’t stay neutral people!
Anyway, is this a joke site?
If you balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack.
But, but, the other terminal on those batteries is floating?
Oh my goodness. This guy os beyond repair.
I’ve heard a lot of “audiophile” bullshit in my life, as I work with audio, but this idiot brats them all by a nautical mile.
Seems like BS to me, like the battery isn’t connected so the wire is effectively an antenna
It’s to boost the volume during Power Ballads.
