To commemorate this event, members of the group and friends gathered for a ceremonial power-down. While the system was live, multi-user, and still on the net, the following command was issued as root, overwriting the contents of the hard disk:
yes 'This disk intentionally left blank. ' | dd of=/dev/xy0c
The machine continued to run for about 30 minutes (!). The only
evidence of anything being awry during this time was that the
destination of each symbolic link contained a fragment of the string
being written!
After 30 mins, the machine came to a sudden and final stop, and was pronounced dead.
Interested onlookers, awaiting the end, watch the system console
(running top) while the fatal command executes.
The machine, with death certificate attached.
The machine was commissioned on 24 Feb 1987 (as a Sun 3/180), and was finally decommisioned on 18 Aug 1995, by which time it was Sun 4/180.