Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.
The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.
Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn’t afford any interruptions.
We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.
One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.
I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.
On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.
For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.
CRT TVs didn’t need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.
The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.
The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.
This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.
To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.
Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.
VCRs didn’t usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.