How a 9-Track Tape Almost Fried a Defense Contractor’s Mainframe: A True Tech Support Near-Disaster
Picture this: it’s the 1980s, the internet is a sci-fi dream, and software updates are delivered by shipping actual magnetic tapes—those iconic 9-track monsters you’ve seen in vintage mainframe photos. At one Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company, a senior applications engineer is about to face a crisis that could brick the computers of a major defense contractor… and possibly his own career.
But thanks to a healthy dose of skepticism, some groveling, and a dash of righteous outrage, disaster was narrowly averted. This is the story of how one engineer caught a catastrophic bug before it torpedoed Very Important Things, and why sometimes, being the office “bad guy” is the only way to save the day.
The Tape That Almost Sank the Ship
In the pre-internet era, software updates didn’t travel down fiber optic lines—they rode in cardboard boxes, encoded on 9-track tapes, and arrived with the same anticipation as a birthday present (if your idea of a present is 1600 BPI of pure hexadecimal magic). At the heart of our tale is u/bwade913, a senior tech support engineer at an EDA company, who spent his days untangling the knottiest problems that could befuddle customers and field engineers alike.
One fateful day, on the eve of a major software release to a defense contractor in Dallas, his manager handed him a mission: verify a crucial bug fix on the pre-release tape before sending it out. Simple enough—except getting the tape wasn’t.
As u/bwade913 recounts, even with seniority, he had to “grovel” before the operations manager, who seemed to take a perverse delight in gatekeeping the precious pre-release media. “Who are you to demand a pre-release tape from me?” she challenged, channeling the true spirit of 1980s office hierarchy.
But persistence paid off. Tape in hand, he loaded it into a machine… and watched, in mounting horror, as the system failed to boot. A second machine, same tape, same brick. Houston, we have a problem.
Outrage, Enemies, and the Power of Speaking Up
Faced with a choice—tiptoe and quietly alert the test group, or go full alarm bell—our hero chose the latter. Marching to the test group, he didn’t mince words: “WTF, you signed off on shipping a tape you didn’t test at all!?!?” Subtlety was not on the menu.
Unsurprisingly, this candor made him some enemies. But as the community pointed out, sometimes you have to risk being “the bad guy” to keep bigger disasters at bay. As u/weirdal1968 dryly observed, “I get wanting to be diplomatic but FFS those bozos would have bricked Very Important Things which would have been a resume stain for said bozos… At least somebody admitted you saved the company from a huge rake->face.”
The fallout was immediate. Shipments were halted, alarms were raised, and the next morning, every desk sported a memo from the test manager: “The top ten reasons we almost shipped an untested tape.” The gist: “We’re overworked and who knew such a minor change could break the installation.” No one was laughing, but everyone was grateful for the near-miss.
Even the tape gatekeeper softened, stopping by to clarify her earlier hardline stance: she was “only kidding” about the groveling. In the high-stakes world of defense contracts, it turns out a little tough love can go a long way—provided someone’s paying attention.
Tales from the Trenches: Hardware Viruses and Classic Cover-Ups
The story struck a chord with tech veterans who’d lived through similar nightmares. One top commenter, u/BlueJaysFeather, put it plainly: “Good thing your manager had you check because apparently nobody else was. Good lord.”
Others chimed in with war stories from the era of tape and disk pack madness. u/dreaminginteal recalled a chilling cycle at their first job: a damaged drive head would ruin a test disk, which would then damage more drives—a “hardware virus” in action. As u/more_exercise quipped, it was like “a Hardware Virus!”—a terrifyingly apt metaphor. The result? A test process that was its own worst enemy, and customer accusations flying before anyone realized the root cause was their “known good” test part.
Meanwhile, some commenters revealed the sneaky tactics companies used to buy time. u/Sjsamdrake confessed that in the 70s and 80s, it was “kinda common to ship out blank tapes” when a release was late. Customers would only realize the ruse after a week, giving the team precious time to fix bugs. “It’s like the old classic trick of renaming a .jpg to .doc to submit homework,” u/proxpi joked. “Oops sorry it’s corrupted, let me resend it to you.”
Lessons Learned: The Cost of Complacency (and the Value of Raising Hell)
So what does this near-miss teach us? For starters, the smallest unchecked change can unleash chaos—especially when the only thing standing between you and disaster is a skeptical, stubborn techie who’s willing to ruffle feathers. As the OP noted in a later comment, “There was a hard disk drive manufacturer here in Colorado that got caught shipping bricks packaged as drives in order to commit an accounting fraud. This was back in the 80s.” When corners get cut, the results can be catastrophic.
It’s a reminder that, in tech, no amount of bureaucracy or pecking order should trump vigilance. As u/weirdal1968 summed up, “don’t they take such things Very Seriously Indeed?” They should—and thanks to one engineer’s refusal to be steamrolled, they did.
Share Your Own “Saved by the Bell” Moments
Have you ever caught a show-stopping bug just before disaster? Or were you the one left cleaning up after a hardware “prion disease”? Share your war stories in the comments below—and don’t forget, sometimes the loudest voice in the room is the one that saves the day.
After all, it’s better to make a few enemies than ship a tape that bricks the Pentagon’s mainframe.
Original Reddit Post: The time we almost shipped tapes that would brick any machine it was installed on,