... DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale ? Anyone remember and/or know? (It seems to apply to other manufacturer's diagnostics as well, even today.) Thanks, Arnold
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 617 bytes --] 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. I suspect a grep of some type on some extremely old net.noise archives of the late 1970s/early 1980s might find it. ᐧ ᐧ On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:31 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote: > ... > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale > > ? > > Anyone remember and/or know? > > (It seems to apply to other manufacturer's diagnostics as well, even > today.) > > Thanks, > > Arnold > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2306 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 860 bytes --] I heard this from my boss in the form "Mainframe programming is like moving a dead whale along the beach by kicking it" around 1985. On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:49 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > 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. > > I suspect a grep of some type on some extremely old net.noise archives of > the late 1970s/early 1980s might find it. > > ᐧ > ᐧ > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:31 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote: > >> ... >> DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale >> >> ? >> >> Anyone remember and/or know? >> >> (It seems to apply to other manufacturer's diagnostics as well, even >> today.) >> >> Thanks, >> >> Arnold >> > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2891 bytes --]
It was DMR who said
Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale along a beach.
My orginal quote about the diagnostics is correct, I'm pretty sure.
Thanks,
Arnold
Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> I suspect a grep of some type on some extremely old net.noise archives of
> the late 1970s/early 1980s might find it.
>
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:31 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> > ...
> > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale
> >
> > ?
> >
> > Anyone remember and/or know?
> >
> > (It seems to apply to other manufacturer's diagnostics as well, even
> > today.)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
> >
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 183 bytes --] On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:57 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote: > It was DMR who said > > Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale along a beach. > It is quite possible. ᐧ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 956 bytes --]
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
norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) wrote:
> 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 thought it was DMR, but I could be wrong. Apologies to SCJ
if so.
Arnold
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 982 bytes --] On Wed, 1 Sept 2021 at 09:49, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > 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. > > I suspect a grep of some type on some extremely old net.noise archives of > the late 1970s/early 1980s might find it. > This was the earliest reference I could easily find, from comp.unix.questions in Jan '87, but the author says it's an old joke. It's the last post in the thread: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.questions/c/fFtkBC3TcLc/m/QphFGT7BAfsJ -Henry > ᐧ > ᐧ > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:31 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote: > >> ... >> DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale >> >> ? >> >> Anyone remember and/or know? >> >> (It seems to apply to other manufacturer's diagnostics as well, even >> today.) >> >> Thanks, >> >> Arnold >> > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2983 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 642 bytes --] On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 10:21 AM Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote: > Running TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach. > I definitely stand corrected on that, now that I recall it was pot shot at IBM, not DEC. > > Since scj is on this list, maybe he can confirm that part. > Very possible -- sound a little less like a Dennis quip than others from those days. > > 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 agree. > Give me XXDP, not just the Blue Screen of Death. > Right. ᐧ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2186 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 704 bytes --] On Wed, 1 Sept 2021 at 10:21, Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote: > 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. > > Here's a Feb '85 net.unix thread that (eventually) attributes this to Steve: https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix/c/jq4KtffXZuI/m/2aTQBUYPyRsJ -Henry [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1192 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 308 bytes --] On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 10:29 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote: > Here's a Feb '85 net.unix thread that (eventually) attributes this to > Steve: > > https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix/c/jq4KtffXZuI/m/2aTQBUYPyRsJ > Thank you Henry - I knew net.noise would be the place to look ;-) ᐧ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1396 bytes --]
>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.
Could be the device itself, corrupting things.
Some problems are just hard to track down. If you remember
the infamous UDA50/RA81 setup, the original Unix driver was
flaky somehow in that it would "lose" MSCP packets and hang.
I rewrote the thing from scratch to fix that problem. But
then we got an Emulex board that had a ... different problem.
I hacked on our driver to find it. The problem turned out
to be that the Emulex hardware (or firmware) would *drop*
16 of the 32 bits of a 32-bit field. In each MSCP packet,
there was a single 32-bit field where you could store arbitrary
data to be reflected back to you in a reply. The Unix driver
stored `struct buf *bp` there, if I remember right, and I
originally did as well.
Once I figured out this was being clobbered, I replaced it
with a small integer (index into "outstanding I/O table") with
check bytes. I'd log the occurrence of corruption, recover the
useful data from the 16 bytes that had the right data, and we
would be on our merry way. There was no obvious pattern here
though.
Two other sort of related war stories...
* We had the carry-chain timing bug on our VAX 780 at one point.
It most-consistently hit on the `extzv` instruction in the
kernel exit() handler, but only about 1 out of every 10 to 100
thousand occurrences. So I wrote a user-land program that
would spin doing that `extzv`. If the user program crashed,
the board-set installed in the backplane had the problem, and
we'd have the DEC service guy cycle through them (in the usual
"how many flat tires do we have today" dance).
* The Ultrasparc II CPU had a similar timing bug, I think in the
register forwarding logic. The BSD/OS SPARC port had a three
instruction sequence for setting up the right stack on a
trap (interrupt, system call, etc)., and it would randomly
crash with a bizarre value, that I eventually figured out
was from putting the result that should have gone into one
of the %l registers, into the %sp register instead. It only
happened after a pipeline flush for other purposes and I
forget what I did to make it happen frequently enough to
diagnose.
(Re-ordering the three instructions fixed the problem.)
Tying back into ZFS etc., if that was on this mailing list: :-)
I had a bad DIMM in an Intel box a while back, that corrupted
data in the kernel buffer pool. That one was scary, because,
while the memtest86 tests found it, who knows what data they
corrupted?
(This is why I want ECC, even in my home systems.)
Chris
of course, the dead whale joke just reminds me of that epic scene from “The Boys” tv show. never mind. andrew
Mike Muuss made some comment about the diagnostics being able to run on a dead whale.
>... > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale > >? > >Anyone remember and/or know? > I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in deference to the TSO comment. >
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 402 bytes --] Another fun saying about TSO: "It may be slow, but it's hard to use." Not sure the origin. On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:10 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote: > > > >... > > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale > > > >? > > > >Anyone remember and/or know? > > > I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in > deference to the TSO comment. > > > > > -- - Tom [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1048 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 635 bytes --] Or JCL “It’s as easy to read one file as it is to read 1000 files." > On 2021, Sep 1, at 12:42 PM, Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: > > Another fun saying about TSO: "It may be slow, but it's hard to use." > > Not sure the origin. > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:10 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com <mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote: > > > >... > > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale > > > >? > > > >Anyone remember and/or know? > > > I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in > deference to the TSO comment. > > > > > > > -- > - Tom [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1844 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 742 bytes --] I first heard it at usenix 1980. On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 10:52 AM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote: > Or JCL “It’s as easy to read one file as it is to read 1000 files." > > On 2021, Sep 1, at 12:42 PM, Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> > wrote: > > Another fun saying about TSO: "It may be slow, but it's hard to use." > > Not sure the origin. > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:10 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote: > >> >> >> >... >> > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale >> > >> >? >> > >> >Anyone remember and/or know? >> > >> I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in >> deference to the TSO comment. >> >> > >> >> > > -- > - Tom > > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1826 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1145 bytes --] It's coming back slowly. It was in response to problems with a dh11. DEC engineer:"did you run diagnostics." Response: as quoted. The other one: DEC engineer: "dh11 can run at a megabit". Response: "in a good wind. " Same person, vague memory is Mike O'Dell? Is that name right? On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 1:00 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > I first heard it at usenix 1980. > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 10:52 AM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> > wrote: > >> Or JCL “It’s as easy to read one file as it is to read 1000 files." >> >> On 2021, Sep 1, at 12:42 PM, Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> >> wrote: >> >> Another fun saying about TSO: "It may be slow, but it's hard to use." >> >> Not sure the origin. >> >> On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:10 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> >... >>> > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale >>> > >>> >? >>> > >>> >Anyone remember and/or know? >>> > >>> I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in >>> deference to the TSO comment. >>> >>> > >>> >>> >> >> -- >> - Tom >> >> >> [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2623 bytes --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1393 bytes --] I also remember, vividly, that it was scj's quote about TSO. Having used TSO, I think he was being kind. -rob On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 6:05 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > It's coming back slowly. It was in response to problems with a dh11. DEC > engineer:"did you run diagnostics." Response: as quoted. > > The other one: DEC engineer: "dh11 can run at a megabit". Response: "in a > good wind. " > > Same person, vague memory is Mike O'Dell? Is that name right? > > On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 1:00 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I first heard it at usenix 1980. >> >> On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 10:52 AM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> >> wrote: >> >>> Or JCL “It’s as easy to read one file as it is to read 1000 files." >>> >>> On 2021, Sep 1, at 12:42 PM, Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> >>> wrote: >>> >>> Another fun saying about TSO: "It may be slow, but it's hard to use." >>> >>> Not sure the origin. >>> >>> On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 9:10 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >... >>>> > DEC Diagnositcs would run on a beached whale >>>> > >>>> >? >>>> > >>>> >Anyone remember and/or know? >>>> > >>>> I believe this was Mike Muuss and he used the term "dead whale" in >>>> deference to the TSO comment. >>>> >>>> > >>>> >>>> >>> >>> -- >>> - Tom >>> >>> >>> [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3188 bytes --]