From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Who said ...
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2021 10:16:38 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210901141638.F064F640CC6@lignose.oclsc.org> (raw)
Clem Cole:
I believe the line was: *"running **DEC Diagnostics is like kicking a dead
whale down the beach.*"
As for who said it, I'm not sure, but I think it was someone like Rob
Kolstad or Henry Spencer.
=====
The nearest I can remember encountering before was a somewhat
different quote, attributed to Steve Johnson:
Running TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach.
Since scj is on this list, maybe he can confirm that part.
I don't remember hearing it applied to diagnostics. I can
imagine someone saying it, because DEC's hardware diags were
written by hardware people, not software people; they required
a somewhat arcane configuration language, one that made more
sense if you understood how the different pieces of hardware
connected together.
I learned to work with it and found it no less usable than,
say, the clunky verbose command languages of DEC's operating
systems; but I have always preferred to think in low levels.
DEC's diags were far from perfect, but they were a hell of a
lot better than the largely-nonexistent diags available for
modern Intel-architecture systems. I am right now dealing
with a system that has an intermittent fault, that causes
the OS to crash in the middle of some device driver every
so often. Other identical systems don't, so I don't think
it's software. Were it a PDP-11 or a VAX I'd fire up the
diagnostics for a while, and have at least a chance of spotting
the problem; today, memtest is about the only such option,
and a solid week of running memtest didn't shake out anything
(reasonably enough, who says it's a memory problem?).
Give me XXDP, not just the Blue Screen of Death.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
next reply other threads:[~2021-09-01 14:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-09-01 14:16 Norman Wilson [this message]
2021-09-01 14:23 ` arnold
2021-09-01 14:27 ` Clem Cole
2021-09-01 14:29 ` Henry Bent
2021-09-01 14:32 ` Clem Cole
2021-09-01 14:48 ` Chris Torek
2021-09-01 16:00 ` Ron Natalie
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-09-01 13:30 arnold
2021-09-01 13:48 ` Clem Cole
2021-09-01 13:55 ` John Cowan
2021-09-01 13:57 ` arnold
2021-09-01 14:11 ` Clem Cole
2021-09-01 14:26 ` Henry Bent
2021-09-01 15:08 ` Andrew Hume
2021-09-01 16:10 ` Ron Natalie
2021-09-01 16:42 ` Tom Lyon via TUHS
2021-09-01 17:41 ` Lawrence Stewart
2021-09-01 20:00 ` ron minnich
2021-09-01 20:04 ` ron minnich
2021-09-01 21:47 ` Rob Pike
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