scratch monkey n.
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 droids 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 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]