Why you should “always mount a scratch monkey.”
MONKEYING AROUND
Whenever you ask the company’s veteran computer guy about reconfiguring or rebooting or another barely comprehensible task related to overhauling your computer, they’ll probably first tell you to “always mount a scratch monkey.” A “scratch monkey” is, to put things simply, a backup drive—an insurance policy against losing precious or irreplaceable data in case your tinkering goes awry.
The phrase has its origins in the tragic tale of Mabel, a miracle monkey on the campus of the University of Toronto who lost her life because a routine computer fix went wrong.
GOING APE
Mabel was a chimpanzee who became a local celebrity during the late 1970s when researchers at the University of Toronto taught her to swim underwater using a SCUBA-like system controlled by a cutting-edge (at the time) DEC VAX-11/780 computer. While she paddled around a tank, her human trainers pumped various gases through her breathing tube to determine their effects. One day the room-sized computer developed a malfunction, so a technician arrived while Mabel was in the pool. You can guess the rest: The technician fouled up the system regulating Mabel’s breathing, there was no backup system, and soon enough the “Swimming Wonder Monkey” had drowned.
Another, slightly more pedestrian (if no less tragic) version of the story concerns a UT experiment that had nothing to do with swimming, but concerned the same computer monitoring the brain waves of five monkeys in a lab. A repair screwup led to the computer emitting electrical signals, rather than receiving them, and two monkeys died.
In 2013, Victoria 15-year-old Ann Makosinski invented a flashlight that’s powered by holding it.