Once upon a time, I was on the receiving end of an SEC audit which required our British subsidiary to send us their transaction log. They didn't have database records for that time period, it was all stored on the Wang which had long since been turned off and put away in a cabinet. They duly mailed us the Wang to extract the data from.

Except they mailed it in a box exactly the size of the external case, with no padding. And, at some point, someone had decided to upgrade the Wang's storage but didn't want to pay for the expensive proprietary hard drive rails, so they had just stacked a bare SCSI Quantum Fireball (full height, about 8 lb?) on top of some wooden spacers.

When I opened the case, there was a deep layer of metal dust and debris in the bottom tray and the motherboard was gleaming clean traces. The hard drive, bouncing around, had scraped off every chip from the motherboard.

I called a Wang expert to see if they could retrieve the data from the disk, and they quoted me $2000 an hour just to take a look with no guarantees. So I ended up reconstituting the data by having a small team type hundreds of thousands of transactions by hand from green-bar printouts that were discovered in the back of that closet in England, and then checking and cross-checking them twice before giving them to the SEC.

FUN TIMES. God bless Wang and proprietary hard drive rails in general.