Re: Audible alarm on our 510

[James Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Larry Bolhuis wrote:
> Audible Alarm? Didn't know there was such a thing. I'm thinking it's 
> more likely a drive crying for attention. Just leave it alone and it 
> will go away soon. ;-)

Yes, Virginia, there is such an audible alarm on an AS/400. The sound is 
definitely issuing from the control panel. It sounds rather like (as one 
colleague put it) a constipated alarm clock, or (as I put it myself, a 
few minutes later) a clarinet being slowly strangled. The engineers must 
have worked long and hard to come up with a sound that quiet, and yet 
that annoying. Up until then, the most annoying alarm I'd heard from a 
piece of computer hardware was the "bell" on an old (and unreliable) 
daisywheel printing terminal in my old high school lab, almost 30 years 
ago: sounded like a duck trying to quack with a stuffed-up nose.

If we power up our 40S without turning a connected terminal on, it lets 
out one or two of these same quietly annoying alarm tones to remind me 
to turn on the 3477 on my desk.