Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > alt.folklore.computers > #163052

Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)?

From Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid>
Newsgroups alt.folklore.computers
Subject Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)?
Date 2016-04-29 15:14 +0200
Organization Me, Myself and I
Message-ID <9a3cvc-345.ln1@sambook.reistad.name> (permalink)
References <PM00053161ACFBFD0A@aca405eb.ipt.aol.com> <PM0005318A62FF5FAD@aca41083.ipt.aol.com> <nftfpu12n8q@news7.newsguy.com> <PM0005319EA3DA0AAC@aca416fa.ipt.aol.com>

Show all headers | View raw

In article <PM0005319EA3DA0AAC@aca416fa.ipt.aol.com>,
jmfbahciv  <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
>Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2016-04-28, jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I never understood why it was so difficult to design a magtape drive
>>> but I didn't investigate the problems.  It just seemed like the
>>> latest device was based on NIH mentalities, never using the aspects
>>> which worked.  Of course, none of the hardware developers ever
>>> had to work 8 hours/day using the drives they designed.  I always
>>> wanted them to be operators for at least a month; the same was true
>>> for the disk drive designers.
>>
>> Not to mention software developers.
>>
>> I always loved that phrase "eat your own dog food".
>>
>After a disasterous ship of TOPS-10, we started to run the week's
>monitor edit.  The monitor edit was Tuesday and JMF/TW spent
>Wednesday morning's stand alone time getting the edit to run.
>then operations asked that we invoke a rule; so we agreed
>to allow operations to drop back to a previous edit after
>three crashes.  Someone would figure out a patch to prevent
>the crashes and produce another monitor which would be
>loaded after the next crash.  (During a monitor development
>cycle, there were always crashes; the number of crashes/day
>would diminish as time went on.

This is something you should write more extensively about, because
it is from a time long gone. Now we have lots and lots of test
hardware, and the development does not have to worry about having
stand alone time on hardware anymore, except for some very rare
ultra large servers and supercomputers.  These largely use
99.5% of the software built for smaller machines, with only some
very small adaptions.

I have done three stints of driver implementation on Linux. Every
time I used at least 4 different machines, two for the actual
testing, and at least two for source storage, editing and builds.

I would guess I am one to two orders of magnitude more productive
in the number of edit/compile/build/run/evaluate/crash cycles, I could
do hundreds of these in a week; and I could edit and build while the
test machines were rebooting.

Not so when hardware was scarce. I remember this time very vividly.
At a PPOE we had production time 0700-1900 on weekdays; and 
emergency recovery tests every first saturday in the month.

Development was either relegated to 5-year-old and very flaky and
slow previous generation machines, or to the off-production time.
It took 3 hours to do a backup, and 4-5 to do a restore of the
production system; so when we could run virtualised we saved an
enourmous amount of time.

-- mrr

Back to alt.folklore.computers | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-04-26 11:42 +0000
  Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> - 2016-04-26 14:36 -0500
    Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-04-27 00:42 +0200
      Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-04-27 13:48 +0000
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-04-28 08:41 +0200
    Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-04-27 12:40 +0000
      Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Andy Burns <feb2017-usenet@adslpipe.co.uk> - 2016-04-27 14:51 +0100
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> - 2016-04-27 22:27 -0500
          Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-04-28 12:06 +0000
            Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2016-04-28 07:49 -0700
              Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2016-04-28 17:03 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? "Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2016-04-28 12:18 -0500
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2016-04-28 11:19 -0700
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2016-04-28 14:19 -0700
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? "Charles Richmond" <numerist@aquaporin4.com> - 2016-04-29 16:47 -0500
              Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-04-29 12:18 +0000
            Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2016-04-28 17:03 +0000
              Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-04-29 12:18 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-04-29 15:14 +0200
            Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? pechter@pechter.net (William Pechter) - 2016-05-03 14:09 +0000
      Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> - 2016-04-27 22:19 -0500
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? pechter@pechter.net (William Pechter) - 2016-05-03 14:21 +0000
      Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? pechter@pechter.net (William Pechter) - 2016-05-03 14:03 +0000
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> - 2016-05-03 13:58 -0500
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> - 2016-05-03 14:22 -0500
          Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? pechter@pechter.net (William Pechter) - 2016-05-04 20:21 +0000
        tape drives [was Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)?] Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> - 2016-05-03 15:39 -0400
        Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-04 13:02 +0000
          Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> - 2016-05-04 11:45 -0500
            Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-05-05 01:13 +0200
              Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <jmelson@wustl.edu> - 2016-05-05 14:25 -0500
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-05 19:34 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-06 13:28 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-06 14:39 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-06 14:41 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-07 13:14 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2016-05-07 16:47 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btopenworld.com> - 2016-05-07 23:30 +0100
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-08 13:08 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Jon Elson <elson@pico-systems.com> - 2016-05-07 16:07 -0500
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-07 21:23 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-08 13:08 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-09 15:13 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2016-05-09 17:05 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? pechter@pechter.net (William Pechter) - 2016-05-09 22:41 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-05-10 12:01 +0200
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> - 2016-05-10 06:42 -0400
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-10 12:34 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-10 13:05 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-11 12:18 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2016-05-11 13:27 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> - 2016-05-10 15:53 +0200
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> - 2016-05-11 12:18 +0000
                Re: IBM's 96 column punch card (was System/3)? "Simo" <dhy287@gmail.com> - 2016-05-10 04:56 +1000

csiph-web