From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] The 2038 bug...
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:34:30 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfqL2ETntycytFLOQOJuvG=kjayoeZukGCpQRE95+X26aA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <X+4aKbZWyHHOf4aZ@mit.edu>
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On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 11:37 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> Twenty years ago, one of larger customers for the company I was
> working for at the time (VA Linux Systems) was one of the new
> electronic stock exchanges, and they were using Linux boxes with
> PDP-11 emulators because their stock trading software was written in
> Macro-11 and running on RSTS/E. They had tried three times to rewrite
> it so it could run on something more modern, but each time, the
> rewrite had ended in failure. So they simply sharded the problem, so
> one x86 server running RSTS/E in emulation would service stocks
> symbols AAAA--ADZZ, and the next would service stocks AEAA--AFZZ, and
> so on. Given that this was back in 1999, I assume they had solved the
> Y2K problem one way or another, but even if they hadn't yet, I suspect
> it would have been easier for them to fix the problem by asking their
> dedicated Macro-11 Software Engineering team to fix it, than to ask
> that same team to help the other team put themselves out of a job
> (which for some reason, never seemed to happen successfully...)
>
This is the sort of reason why QBUS x86 machines exist... Not cheap, or
easy to come by these days, but they filled a niche of emulation but with
access to real hardware... Nor easy to find with a web search, it seems :(.
There's a number of nuclear power plants that employ MACRO-11 programmers
because they can't swap out the old gear w/o going through a prohibitively
expensive recertification process... It's cheaper to hire and train good
programmers than it is to go through that process :(.
Warner
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-31 21:35 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 34+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-31 7:19 Dave Horsfall
2020-12-31 7:24 ` Niklas Karlsson
2020-12-31 8:10 ` arnold
2020-12-31 15:30 ` Warner Losh
2020-12-31 16:09 ` Adam Thornton
2020-12-31 16:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-01-11 7:18 ` alan
2021-01-11 14:01 ` Stuart Remphrey
2020-12-31 18:36 ` Theodore Ts'o
2020-12-31 21:34 ` Warner Losh [this message]
2021-01-06 16:32 ` Dario Niedermann
2021-01-06 17:08 ` Henry Bent
2021-01-06 18:05 ` Dario Niedermann
2021-01-06 18:20 ` Michael Kjörling
2021-01-06 21:09 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-31 19:18 ` Bakul Shah
2021-01-04 8:22 ` Peter Jeremy via TUHS
2021-01-04 9:13 ` Angus Robinson
2021-01-04 21:49 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-01-04 21:56 ` Warner Losh
2021-01-05 18:05 ` Dan Cross
2021-01-06 7:21 ` Warner Losh
2021-01-07 22:56 ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-08 1:25 ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-01-10 6:56 ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-04 8:59 ` Sergio Pedraja
2021-01-07 22:50 ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-10 7:16 ` Valdimar Sigurdsson
2021-01-10 7:24 ` Niklas Karlsson
2021-01-10 10:15 ` Stuart Remphrey
2020-12-31 15:05 M Douglas McIlroy
2020-12-31 16:51 ` arnold
2020-12-31 23:31 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-01-09 8:44 Norman Wilson
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