Dec Rainbow prehistory

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Wed Nov 19 19:17:45 2003

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 16:19, Fred N. van Kempen wrote:
> On 19 Nov 2003, Tom Jennings wrote:
>
> > I do recall some severe stack-depth problem, I had to switch stack
> > pointers in the I/O drivers somewhere I recall. I think. Wish I had the
> > code!
> [mumbles something about silly programmers and not making
> backups]

It gets worse!

I *did* backups. Now I certainly was dumb enough to delete old BIOS code
(there were also liability issues; it wasn't my code), but here's the
worst part:

I had tape backup starting in the CP/M days (I wrote a start/stop
DC300-type tape backup system for Alloy), went without for a small gap
in the pre-hard-disk days of MSDOS (when 10MB RLL MFM drives cost actual
money), then QIC and other formats, etc.

So I'm merrily doing monthly dumps, rotating weekly dumps and often
daily diff tapes, and got lax in checking the tapes afterwards... I
didn't realize my tape drive had been drifting out of alignment(or
something) until the 100MB hard disk crashed suddenly, and found I had
lost my life's work. This was in 1993 or 94.

I no longer do "backups". I take John Gilmore's advice, everything is on
a rotating spindle in a machine on the net running syslog, etc. If one
of the drives (etc) goes bad, it gets immediate attention like any
operating computer does. Cron and rsync and ssh, machines separated 1500
miles apart. Four live, error-corrected copies of everything. Plus a few
CDROM copies (as universal a medium as IBM3740, I'm sure).

Plus I'm slowly printing on paper. The only stuff I have left that's
"old" is 6800 code I wrote for my SWTPC, a 7-track magtape filesystem
and executive (it's godawful, filled with embarrassments and horrors,
but it was interrupt driven, very clever) which was printed on good old
lineprinter paper.

I can take a hint.

Use good paper, good ink.

Maybe I shoudl punch a few thousand kilometers of tape?
Received on Wed Nov 19 2003 - 19:17:45 GMT