Baby, it's cold inside!

Flash back to the 1960s, when this pilot fish is a part-time computer operator at his university's campus computer center.

"The computer center was in an annex off the engineering building," says fish. "We had three computers -- an IBM 360/65, IBM 7044 and IBM 1401, which all put out a massive amount of heat and required air conditioning 24/7."

Because fish lives in town and everyone else goes home for the holidays, fish gets the chore of powering everything down on Dec. 24 and reopening the computer room at 6 a.m. on the 26th.

It's bitterly cold on Christmas Eve, but fish shows up, performs his assigned tasks, shuts down all the hardware and goes home.

But when he returns on the 26th, he knows immediately that something's wrong. His first clue: He can see his breath inside the computer room.

And when he powers up the 360/65, he's nearly blinded by the red lights indicating system failures. With the 7044, same result.

"But the trusty 1401, which was used only for I/O, powered up just fine," fish reports. "It served as an electronic campfire around which I sat making desperate calls to every engineer in the call list, asking for help.

"Turns out that, since we were operating 24/7 with huge thermal output, no one had given much thought to supplying heat to the computer room!"

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