Computers are more important than human life?

Way back in the early 1980s I worked on a large mainframe computer in London.  This beast ran at an amazing speed (for then) and generated a significant amount of heat.  The computer room was the size of a football pitch and contain latest state of the art hard disk drives, tape drives, printers, etc.

The computers were cooled using halon, so there were massive tanks of the stuff circulating round the hardware trying to keep it cool.  The management’s main concern was a fire as there was no offsite backup of the data and so they installed halon gas extinguishers into the ceiling of the computer room which would go off in the event of smoke being detected.  They calculated that the data was safe for about 10 seconds in the event of fire, so set the halon to go off 7 seconds after detecting the fire.  

For those of you who don’t know, halon has the property of removing oxygen so the fire would go out.  One tiny detail was overlooked – humans need oxygen to live.  If you were at the far end of the computer room, i.e. furthest away from the door, we calculated we could not run to the door in less than 20 seconds, even at panic speed.  Given the efficiency of halon, we reckoned we would be dead in less than 15 seconds.  But, it got worse, 10 seconds after the fire alarm went off the lead lined exit door was locked automatically to prevent any fire spreading, so even if you were half way down the room you wouldn’t get out in time.

Where were the system consoles positioned?  You’ve guessed it, right at the far end of the computer room.

Of course the management were very concerned when we pointed this out to them, they immediately sprung into action and moved the system consoles to just near the door – 2 years after we notified them of the problem.