Article about collecting in Antique Trader.

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Fri Jul 2 00:14:01 1999

Glen Godwin wrote:
> I'll bet it was! I once caused an uproar at BP's MIS Dept. over some code I
> wrote to batch transaction records from PCs to VAXen via ATT Mail ... nobody
> told me the VAX would puke if it encountered a null in a data record . . .
> and that was just _software_ . . . taught me a lesson: never rock the "big
> iron" . . .

It could be worse. Something slightly similar happened to me, except that I
think I was using the vendor-supplied utilities.

The system in question was a VAX at Pomona College (a small school in
California). I was employed as an operator (= peon who separated and filed
prinouts and mounted 9-track tapes for backups, also solved general lab
problems with PCs and Macintoshes). I thought the backup program had
finished using a tape so I dismounted and rewound it. The backup program
had a total conniption fit, with annoying and incessant messages appearing
on my console and the system manager's console. Shortly after that, the
system manager had a conniption fit of his own. :) Pretty poor program
design, if you ask me.

Man, was that VAX ever overworked. Pomona's UNIX coverage was very limited
(a NeXT and a Sun running OpenLook, neither of which anyone knew how to use)
but in spite of that I decided then and there that I preferred UNIX to VMS.
In fairness, Harvey Mudd (engineering school, part of the same group of
colleges) had much better UNIX systems.

-- Derek
Received on Fri Jul 02 1999 - 00:14:01 BST