From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 12:18:41 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] [OT] VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20161020011841.GC31179@eureka.lemis.com> On Wednesday, 19 October 2016 at 7:49:48 -0400, Dan Cross wrote: > On Oct 18, 2016 11:36 PM, "Andy Kosela" wrote: >> On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 6:05 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> >> >> >> What operating system was installed on that VAX? VMS or UNIX? > > > I've always loved this story, but surely it's apocryphal? If Black > Monday had been due to an operator rebooting a VAX that would have > certainly made the news.... Clearly some of the details are fictional or strongly exaggerated, but could the story not be based on fact? Ten years before this event I was in a big company in Germany with IBM (3080) and UNIVAC (494) computer systems, and we installed a little Tandem/16 machine in the middle of it. The IBM operators had to tend to the Tandem too, and it's clear they didn't consider it a Real Computer. But the details? Sure, different shops have different cultures, but backups, for example, went without saying. In the days where tapes were bigger than disks, we made a complete backup of the system every night, which occasionally came in handy (see http://www.lemis.com/grog/warstories/fuppurgestar.php for one example). And reboots? The IBM systems did an IPL (Initial Program Load, their word for boot) every Monday morning. All morning, if I recall correctly. The UNIVAC people and we smiled sympathetically and carried on running. But then, in our case the IBM people didn't come closer to the system than to change tapes, and they didn't know how to reboot it. If they had done, there would have been hell to pay. But as I say, different cultures. And the transfer itself? This was 1987! People didn't transfer that much money. By this time I was OS support manager for Tandem Europe, and our customers included all large banks in Europe. With the exception of one large British bank (who used trained monkeys), all banks had reasonably responsible operators. The CHAPS system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAPS) had just gone live on our platform, and the average transfer was "only" £5,000 million. And of course it used modern databases. A failure of a machine in the network could not have resulted in any loss of data integrity. Finally, of course, the real reasons for Black Monday (1987) are known. They have nothing to do with (computer) operator error. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: