| To: Zen Dollar Round who wrote (6963) | 8/7/2022 5:03:43 PM | | From: LoneClone | | | | My first interaction with Microsoft reaches back to 1984. I was hired by a government department to do research and analysis, and among the tools I was given was access to one of the first microcomputers bought by our provincial government as well as this new-fangled software called Excel. When I couldn't figure out some feature I would call up Microsoft and ask them about it, usually getting a response along the lines of "Well, maybe this will work. Let us know when you tried it." Once I got to know the people I was calling they confessed that I was probably the first person outside the developers to try it, and they really weren't certain what would happen.
I later found out that in those days Microsoft had one tester for every 20 developers. Today software companies normally employ more testers than developers.
It took only two days for one of my fellow employees to accidentally wiped the hard drive, which unlike today, was pretty darn easy to do by mistake. I also remember going in and editing the memory bit by bit to regain access to lost data.
LC |
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| To: LoneClone who wrote (6965) | 8/7/2022 5:18:24 PM | | From: John Carragher | | | | wipe out the hard drive. ha. I remember putting in a 1400 system. around 1967. I was to be supervisor programmer after the initial team left building the programs, files etc. I had a computer operator who loaded a sales deck of cards on top of a very complex invoicing program. the file was not protected. the programmers were pissed!
all I said was you need to protect your files. it took them just a weekend to rebuild the program on disc.
we still had an 029 sorter. we used to have to sort the punch cards to run another program.
that system lasted until the early 80's using a 360/25 system in autocoder.ggggggggg |
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| To: John Carragher who wrote (6966) | 8/7/2022 9:51:37 PM | | From: engineer | | | | when I was in college, I had a job working for the US government running programs on their brand new CDC 6600 with all the possible beels and whistles.
My job consist4ed of edting a Job rn deck and then submitting a huge 10 box set of program and data car to be run.
So I edited the deck and submitted it. Then I got a call from the base commander wanting to see me in his ofice.
the brand new machine has burned out it's main memroy and completely destroyed itself.
Turns out I had inadvertantly put in a wrong jump to address and the control deck was jumping to it self on a single line. The designers of the mainframe had never designed a plated wire top end memory to jump like that and just keep accessing the same location. It overheated the plated wire inside the memory and burnt it out.
Cost to replace it was $250k in 1973, which was alot. CDC had to not only replace it, but had to redesign the entire memory card system to allow for this mistake.
I never had to run these jobs again. |
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| To: engineer who wrote (6967) | 8/8/2022 2:34:28 AM | | From: Zen Dollar Round | | | | >Cost to replace it was $250k in 1973, which was alot...
> I never had to run these jobs again.
Lol, yes, $250K in 1973 is roughly $1.6M in today's dollars, so that is a pricey error.
I'm always amazed that people who make such costly mistakes often keep their jobs, but I never made one nearly that expensive but I was never in a position to do so... at least not without doing it intentionally.
You didn't say whether you kept that job or were fired, but I'm guessing you kept it since I've read about many cases like this over the years.
Not criticizing you, everyone makes mistakes, and even CEOs are hired and fired all the time.
Kudos to you for posting it publicly, many would be to embarrassed to do so, even after 50 years. :-) |
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| To: Zen Dollar Round who wrote (6968) | 8/8/2022 12:26:36 PM | | From: engineer | | | | the outcome was that CDC was deemed at fault for having a misdesigned memory unit and they had to go back and do alot of fixes on their nickel. All that happened to me was that they just asked what I did and when I showed them, they were mad at CDC.
Anyone could have put in a card saying to jump to itself, thus made the mainframe insecure to run the jobs that it ran.
No they did not fire me, they hired me and I stayed there for 10 more years. |
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| To: LoneClone who wrote (6965) | 8/10/2022 11:19:50 PM | | From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell | | | | Do you recall an Office component called InfoPath? It was basically a form designer where the data was stored separately from the form itself. In reading the Wikipedia article on it, I see the designers patented this approach. Kinda funny as I had pioneered that idea back when laser printers first came out. The further irony being guess who Microsoft contracted with to write the application they showcased when they debuted the product in NYC? Yep, me!
Infopath IMHO was dead on arrival. But, hey, they flew me to Redmond, gave me a nice tour, I got to buy whatever I wanted for basically nothing in their company store, and so forth. No meeting with Bill Gates, though.
- Jeff |
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| From: LoneClone | 8/22/2022 3:15:04 PM | | | | | | Of late, someone who runs a board I have frequented for years has started making OT political posts. When I asked him to make those posts elsewhere, I got banned from the board. Is there an appeal mechanism for situations like this?
LC |
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