scratch monkey

As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a

scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when

dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to

any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky

operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data

that might otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder

Monkey, star of a biological research program at the

University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes)

your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching

her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to

study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology.

Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC engineer

troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently

interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.

It is reported that, after calming down an understandably

irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the

matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus

manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?"

Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop

of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the

behest of certain clueless droids at the local "humane"

society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a

scratch monkey.

[There is a version of this story, complete with reported

dialogue between one of the project people and DEC field

service, that has been circulating on Internet since 1986. It

is hilarious and mythic, but gets some facts wrong. For

example, it reports the machine as a PDP-11 and alleges that

Mabel's demise occurred when DEC PMed the machine. Earlier

versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has

been corrected from an interview with the hapless sysop. -

ESR]

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-15)