3 ms·
Annecdotes: Many years ago, when I was working at the BBC and writing end-user applications in a 4GL called SeaChange (which had very crappy debugging tools) I
by zabzonk 5y ago
Annecdotes:
Many years ago, when I was working at the BBC and writing end-user applications in a 4GL called SeaChange (which had very crappy debugging tools) I was reduced to kneeling on the floor and listening to the hard drives to check what was going on. I seem to remember reading about Ken Thompson doing something similar (not comparing myself here).
And another physical hard drive story - the first one I ever got bought, for a DEC Rainbow (PC class computer), came in a crate the size of a small fridge (like the ones you get in hotel rooms) and took about an hour to unpack.
Ooh and mentioning DEC and disks I remember when I first used a DECSystem10 repeatedly submitting "mount prog" requests (to actually physically mount the "prog" disk pack so that I could use LISP) until the very cross operators (remember them?) rang me and said "we are doing scheduled backups, you idiot". I was always nice to operators after that.
- Isamu 5y agoHa, yeah I remember doing many repeated mount/unmount requests on the school’s DECSystem20 before I realized it was a request for the human operator to find a magtape and thread it through the reel-to-reel. I was reading font data. Times have changed.
- zabzonk 5y agoMercifully, I had nothing to do with tape drives then, much horror later. And shortly after we converted from the DEC10 to a couple of IBM 4381s, who's backup regimes I simply did not want to know about - fingers in ears and screaming. But I did like them and wrote a distributed printing system for them in Rexx.