Corrupt Data Filled the Air Waves

I had worked at a large commercial furniture manufacture, when I left, they hired me as a 'contractor as needed'.

The engineering department came up with a new motorized desk for height adjustment. after all the tests were done successfully, or they thought all the tests were done. They ordered thousands of motors for production.

The one test that they didn't performed was actually having a computer on the new motorized desk as it functioned. Turned out the motor was not shielded, and interfered with the computer monitors.

They had to reorder shielded motors.

Years ago I worked at a scientific instrument manufacturer near Boston. Their corrupting 'signal' was a bit different: it was 'DC'.

The company's Accounting Department was right above the lab where they had the NMR spectrometers with their 2.4-Tesla superconducting magnets. Where you'd normally expect to see nice, neat little rows and columns on Accounting's spreadsheets, the images were all warped and twisted this way and that from magnets on the floor below. It's a wonder their hard drives didn't go south along with their credit cards and wrist watches. I don't recall if their books ever balanced.

...and nobody clicked that an FM radio wasn't playing in the background....

The only reason you don't hear a radio playing at some work places is because you can't pickup anything but noise. Normally if a radio station can be picked up then somebody there would be doing it.

Nice story...especially the feeble excuse for the crap BER.

when did FM radio stations become popular. I don't think it was prevent at that time?

The experience shared in that article was time stamped 1980s...

....definitely the FM radio era.