I got proper air conditioning a short time later, but unfortunately developed a bad case of hiccups that struck regularly at 12 second intervals. My assistants spent a number of days trying to find the cause of this mysterious malady without success. Further investigation revealed that the high-powered air defense radar atop Mt. Umunhum, about 20 miles away, was causing some of my transistors to act as radio receivers. We solved this problem by improving my grounding. After I had been running awhile, someone at DEC noticed that my purchase order, which was based on their quotation, was badly screwed up.
Humans are notoriously bad at arithmetic.
This had somehow passed through the entire purchasing bureaucracy of Stanford without anyone noticing. We ended up correcting the arithmetic error but not the factors of 10. The DEC salesman lost his job as a result of this incident. I acquired a number of new peripherals in rapid succession, the first being a DEC Model 30 display that was stolen from my cousin, the PDP-1 timesharing system called Thor. That feature turned out to have many useful applications in robotics and general hardware debugging.