OffTopic: Intel's dependent on the Alpha chip...

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Nov 1 16:14:31 2001

> > Where I used to work, there was an IBM PS/2 model 80 that was installed
> > in a closet to do coordination of manufacturing equipment status and
> > utilization reports when it was new. It ran DOS. It was deinstalled in
> > May 2001. It had been running continuously without a crash, except for
> > losses of power, and that only happened twice in the same year, in 1992.
>
> i wouldn't doubt it, i used to run DOS on my 386 many moons ago, and it
never
> gave me any trouble. it's great. it's almost entirely useless for doing
more
> than one thing at a time. when you get to be that simple, stability is just
> about given to you. but once you step up to large multiuser systems you
have
> all sorts of contention for the same resources that you don't have in a
single
> tasking environment. so yeah, i believe you are right. i'm not, however
very
> impressed. :)
>
> why don't you start throwing mainframe data at us? mainframes run a lot
like
> the old vaxen, uptimes in the double digit years range.

Heh... depends on the mainframe.

The CDC-6600, the world's first supercomputer, was for many years
rated as having a mine-hour MTBF... turned out that was because a
counter was oveflowing after 9 hours of ticking away, and only
under one particular operating system (SCOPE). But even under the
more-stable KRONOS operating system, the field engineers typically
took it down for an hour each morning. Periodically, they would
polish the platters on one of the disk drive units (in the early
90s, we used to kid about using Lemon Pledge to cure stiction, but
they drives *really* did get polished), while smoking a cigarette.

Ok, I'm drifting away from reliability, so I'd better cut & run.

-dq
Received on Thu Nov 01 2001 - 16:14:31 GMT