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} {field circus} 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 {droid}s at the
local `humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always
mount a scratch monkey. [The actual incident occured in 1979 or 1980.
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 {PM}ed 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]
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {monkey, scratch}{PM}{provocative maintenance}{scratch}{scratch monkey}]