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Old 22nd Oct 2019, 6:32 pm   #1
high_vacuum_house
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Default Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Good evening,
I found this on the speaker board of a Murphy A38 I was fitting a new speaker cloth to. It was on the outer side of the board and written with a fairly soft pencil just says "NEXT XMAS" I wander who wrote it or why. There were no more markings on the speaker board.
It certainly is the first time since the speaker cloth was originally fitted that it has been read!!. It has been carefully cleaned and preserved so in another 80 years someone else can look at it!
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Old 22nd Oct 2019, 6:46 pm   #2
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

A moment of abstraction for some line worker decades ago, to finish the sentence i suggest quote, we'll be millionaires!.
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Old 22nd Oct 2019, 7:04 pm   #3
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Recently I acquired an old ?60s Philips battery eliminator Type N6502/16 which I have just converted from multivolt to 18V regulated. The previous owner etched their initials on the bottom 'BK'. Thanks to him/her I have quite a neat power supply now for my RP25B.
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 10:00 am   #4
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Years back I was involved with testing/calibration of EMS synthesisers. One of our testers had a habit of using bad language on fault stickers for the PCB's such as 'Osc 1 knackered' to quote a printable one. On one occasion a board with a number of such stickers was mistakenly included for export to the USA. You can imagine a remark like "You ain't kidding pal" when the recipient opened the package!
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 11:10 am   #5
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

I spotted a couple of words on the magnet holder in a 1940s Megger that was sold to me for the value of the wooden case.
It works perfectly and I never spotted the faint words until I enlarged the photos I took.
I do use it some times too.
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 1:20 pm   #6
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

You can only wonder at what was mean't by the message "Next Xmas" perhaps it was a worker with a love message to some one down the production line or an offer of marriage!! What fun it is to speculate.
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 3:16 pm   #7
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

I imagine these sets would have cost several weeks wages back in the day. I wonder if a production line worker might have wanted to own one and thinking (or writing) out loud "Next Christmas" to fulfill their dream?
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 5:03 pm   #8
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

What were the words on your Megger, Refugee?

You can't leave us in suspense by only telling half a tale!
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 8:22 pm   #9
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

I like finding things like this in old sets! My Ekco RS3 had quite a few scribbles in pencil in various places on the chassis, none were really legible unfortunately.

A much more modern one, I bought an LP from a company in Finland, and in the packaging there was a piece of cardboard with something in Finnish written on it, I guess it was a message for the packing team as to what was supposed to be packed, and wasn’t meant to end up being shipped! Google translate didn’t really make much sense of it!

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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 8:56 pm   #10
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

I had the same notions as Howard p7* and especially Chris p6*...bearing in mind that the production lines seemed to be predominately staffed by women who may well have been fitting the speaker cloths

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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 10:24 pm   #11
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

In the 1970's, one of the engineers at Plessey who was designing custom ICs used to amuse himself by including the odd non-functional structure on one of the mask layers, such as a simple fish. When management found out, they were not impressed, but later it was realised that it was advisable to include redundant items on the maskwork to detect copying. I noticed the occasional non-functional example on photos of Plessey IC chips that appeared in the technical press in the 1980's . My favourite was an IC made for BT which, in one corner, featured Buzzby (complete with bib), strung up from a telegraph pole.
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Old 23rd Oct 2019, 11:26 pm   #12
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lancs Lad View Post
What were the words on your Megger, Refugee?

You can't leave us in suspense by only telling half a tale!
I never paid too much attention at the time but I do still have the photos I took at the time although I did enhance the date a bit.
I have taken snap shots of the best photo and got them so that they will not be reduced when I upload them.
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Old 24th Oct 2019, 12:31 am   #13
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

You can find all manner of strange things carved into vinyl records alongside the pressing numbers by the label/runout grooves.
Oops, that could be an entirely new thread.
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Old 24th Oct 2019, 4:55 am   #14
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Quote:
Originally Posted by emeritus View Post
In the 1970's, one of the engineers at Plessey who was designing custom ICs used to amuse himself by including the odd non-functional structure on one of the mask layers, such as a simple fish. When management found out, they were not impressed, but later it was realised that it was advisable to include redundant items on the maskwork to detect copying. I noticed the occasional non-functional example on photos of Plessey IC chips that appeared in the technical press in the 1980's . My favourite was an IC made for BT which, in one corner, featured Buzzby (complete with bib), strung up from a telegraph pole.
I read somewhere that one version of the microVAX CPU chip has (on the silicon) 'Stealing the best' (or something similar) in Russian.

Then there are the cartoons on (official) circuit diagrams. At least Tektronix and HP had a few of those. The one I remember is the cleaning lady kneeling on the screen of the CRT in the Tektronix 564 storage circuit, mopping up the flood put there by the flood guns
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Old 24th Oct 2019, 7:02 pm   #15
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

Not on the PCB, but I once did find a message inside some C code. It wasn't just comments either. I asked the developers, and they told me they wanted something that would be copied from ROM (flash) into RAM during a cold start. Then on a warm start they could compare ROM and RAM to see if there had been a partial power loss during sleep corrupting memory. It was the names of the development team, and the message There is a Nosferatu working at ***.
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Old 24th Oct 2019, 7:31 pm   #16
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

I think all of those who've ever done much code-support have come across 'unusual' comments in the source-text.

One I remember - about 3000 lines into some up-until-then rigorously-and-well-commented computational-fluid-dynamics aquifer-simulation FORTRAN-60 said

"You've been reading the comments so far; so you should understand my syntax-style. Now you're on your own".

afer which there are no further comments whatsoever in the next 6000 lines!

Also, in some DNS-configuration files (referred-to from within named.conf) I looked-after had comments like "DO NOT EVEN THINK OF CHANGING THIS ADDRESS OR YOU WILL DIE!", and in an edit-log entry for an IP-address of a.b.c.42 was the comment "Life, the Universe, and Everything".

As to 'stuff' etched on semiconductor masks, I remember seeing a rather stylised ASCII-Art cat-face on one bit of high-speed ECL (I think it was one of the AMD2900 bit-slice chipset used in 1980s real-time image-processing gear) under which was the text "The Cat's Whiskers"; magazines like "Electronic Design" would sometimes report this sort of thing.

I'll not go into the details of the 'erotic ASCII art' that used to circulatr on magtapes in times-past.
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Old 24th Oct 2019, 11:25 pm   #17
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

At one company I worked for there was a comment " If it gets this far it'll be a miracle" at one point in the listing.

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Old 24th Oct 2019, 11:55 pm   #18
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

When re-capping a Chapman S6BS, I found that a number of the original 100nF Hunts Mouldseals had "Betty" pencilled on the paper labels- could this have been a quality control requirement or just a quiet bit of individual initiative?

This thread has reminded me of a Tektronix 'scope circuit (forget model)- on the PSU diagram, "pilot light" had a cartoon of a wee gremlin type lofting a rush lantern next to it.
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Old 25th Oct 2019, 5:46 pm   #19
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

When I withdrew the chassis from our old Marconi 272 to repair it in about 1955 (it actually got scrapped, as I found a better set) I found the name "Arthur" neatly written on the inside bottom of the cabinet in pencil.
Re the preceeding post - Lowrey organs were noted for bits of philosophic text in the cicuit diagrams in their service manuals. See below. Tony.
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Old 25th Oct 2019, 6:46 pm   #20
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Default Re: Small message found on Murphy A38 speaker board

If you want to install MacOS in Virtualbox, there's a bit of the virtual memory that you have to patch with "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)A ppleComputerInc"
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