Funny thing with the clock under Sunview

[Detlev_Seidel_UNIV_OF_HANOVER%eurokom.ie at cunyvm.cuny.edu]

This afternoon we had a strange thing happening to the clock under
Sunview. We had transferred a tarfile via ftp from an ultrix machine and
copied it to our tape drive (we needed to get a DECtape to a SUNtape).  To
verify the writing we just did a "tar vt" and as expected got the listing
of the whole content of the tarfile as it was on tape. The tarfile was
very big (28Meg) and had a lot of files in it, many of them fairly small.
Then somebody clicked the clock icon, I believe, or even nobody did
anything. But the clock started rotating at a fairly decent speed. The
speed was actually dependent on the output rate of the tar command. When
big files were shown little output came to the screen and the speed of the
clock got up to 1-2Hz. The date didn't change, by the way.  Did anybody
ever observe something like this?

Detlev Seidel  University of Hanover
E-mail:detlev_seidel at eurokom.ie.