>>We've once lost the system clock on the VAX - a power spike fried some parts of the motherboard - so at every boot it needed the system time to be entered, with a very demanding syntax. I entered it right, down to the second, missed only the millennium. The year was 2988 ;).
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>What, you didn't have the VAX base time unit of MicroFortNights memorized? For shame... <g>

Wow... this was a true memory refresh cycle. I completely forgot the bugger. I did read somewhere about it (I was the system manager on the box), but since entering the date was the system operator's job, I did it myself less than ten times altogether. That day, the coffee cook was late, so the operator made coffee, and I took over the boot sequence... almost perfectly ;).