RM> Finally, everyone must leave the reactor hall through another
RM> locked turnstile that checks for radiation. The guide, however,
RM> could not get out. Her magnetic security card had somehow
RM> self-erased. So while the tour waited on one side of the safety
RM> barrier, the guards had to turn off the alarm system to let the
RM> guide through to join them.

RM> Nobody seemed very bothered, though.

 And the World ends, not with a bang but a whimper...

 The concept of "failsafe" has always amused me. They come at it all
wrong.

 When we were designing the old T-29 colour set, the main fear was
reliability, so I bought a Toshiba set and went through it to see what
the Japs did. They did nothing but use very large heatsinks, so I
did that, and then had the brilliant idea to use big transistors with
large current limiting resistors in the power stages. The idea was
that it could short out and not blow up anything else. It cost a bit
extra, but cost was the least of our problems.

 My old T-29 failed the other day... dry joints after 25 years! The
horizontal stage was running with half-drive and then no drive, back
and forth: full picture, half-width, no width, for a fortnight. When I
found the fault I wondered why it hadn't blown the output stage... and
then I remembered that I'd made it failsafe.

Regards,
Bob

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5