Re: A small story of IMP #1 and the UCLA Computer Club

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Mon, 1 Jun 2026 11:41:23 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Another IMP story...

The "Pluribus" computer was a BBN creation that included highly 
redundant hardware, with multiple everythings.   The idea was that no 
matter what failed, the system would keep running while repairs were 
made.  Of course a Pluribus could be used as an IMP, which was popular 
in some government installations.  One day at BBN, I heard this story.  
Wasn't there myself, but I can believe it.

A Pluribus IMP was being decommissioned at some government site.  They 
happened to have a variety of military stuff around.   So someone 
decided to see if the Pluribus IMP was as reliable as it was touted to be.

The IMP was set up, still running.   Someone got a rifle (M-16?) and 
started shooting at the IMP.  Really.  Sadly I don't recall the number, 
but the IMP survived an amazing number of direct hits at point blank 
range, and still kept passing traffic.

Where did those folks in the Computer Club go after leaving UCLA...?  
Any of them in ROTC?

/Jack

On 6/1/26 11:22, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> This is a trivial, and quite irreverent, bit of Internet history....
>
> I, like several others, were members of the UCLA computer club during 
> the late 1960's.  The club's office was in Boelter Hall - not far from 
> the room that held IMP #1 (and the Sigma computer - along with its 
> "Sigma EXecutive" documentation, aka "SEX Manuals".  My project's 
> computer, an IBM 7094 - with a true memory leak [the core memory was 
> oil cooled, and that oil leaked] - was in the next room over and we 
> could hear the squeals from the AM radio caused by the RF noise from 
> the IMP and the Sigma.)
>
> Anyway, folks in the Computer Club - especially Mark Kampe - kinda 
> like to pull pranks.  For instance, we would drop things from the top 
> of Boelter Hall (9 floors up) to see what would happen.  The landing 
> zone was the collection of crunched and bent automobiles resulting 
> from the early crash-tests of my group, the Institute of Traffic and 
> Traffic Engineering.  We dropped everything from frozen superballs to 
> a lead container used to hold/transport radioactive materials [it was 
> empty].  There was also a feisty ice-cream vending machine in the 
> hallway that once-too-often failed to deliver the paid-for frozen 
> treat - so someone in the club unplugged the machine for a few hours, 
> everything inside melted, and then plugged it back in, re-frezzing the 
> leaking drippy mess.  That was not nice, but it was - here's a 
> terrible pun - that vending machine received its just desserts.
>
> Anyway, back to Internet History...
>
> IMP #1 had the rough appearance of an armor plated refrigerator, with 
> lifting lugs on the top.  The machine was "ruggedized".
>
> That word, ruggedized, was like honey to ants - it seriously caught 
> our attention.  So we (I think Mark K. in particular) asked "Is it 
> rugged enough to survive a drop from the top of Boelter Hall?".
>
> So our imaginations lit up with images of us grabbing IMP #1, hauling 
> it up to the roof and dropping it into the crashed cars nine floors 
> below.
>
> Obviously, prudence and sanity - and perhaps even some, probably 
> reluctant, respect for law - prevailed.  We never did get beyond the 
> "what if we did this" stage.
>
> (But a couple of years later some of us migrated from UCLA to SDC in 
> Santa Monica.  At SDC we had an extremely awful HP 2000 minicomputer 
> that, if I remember properly, did actually suffer such a fate as it 
> was dropped it from the roof of the Q7A building - three stories tall 
> - onto the parking lot - a fate that all of us applauded. [It was 
> truly a terrible machine with an even worse operating system.]  Some 
> of use, years later, moved onto the Interop show nets were we sometime 
> had to practice the delicate art of percussive maintenance.)
>
>         --karl--
>

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