World disk storage production in 1983

In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:
In comp.arch.storage Tim McCaffrey wrote:
In article ,
says...

Any exciting cyber 750 stories? I still want one of those control data lab
coats.



Exciting? Hmmm...

Well, there are the usual stories about printers catching on fire, card
readers in make-a-mess mode, and disk drives walking across the floor, but
I
wasn't directly involved in those.

I guess the most exciting thing I was involved with is I found a system
bug,
crashed the system three times in a row, and caused 30 minutes of hair
pulling
on the part of operations and the systems programming dept.

(I was allowed to call myself systems programmer after that, since only a
systems programmer would crash the system three times before deciding it
must
be him doing the deed).

I worked in the User Information Center as a "Consultant", which meant that
non undergraduate student users could come ask us questions about the
system,
a large portion of which were "why doesn't my program work?". I got damn
good
at debugging large, complex Fortran programs (if they brought the dump
print
out). It was fun to watch somebody's face when they brought in a three
inch
thick listing of a program they have been trying to debug for a couple of
weeks without success, and then I found their bug in less than 15 minutes.

I even got to teach boolean logic to a CS professor once.

- Tim



I like the fast debugging part.

I asked a computer teacher why they were a computer teacher and the answer
was when they were in college only the computer rooms were air conditioned
so they took computer classes, like them and stuck with it.

The other area that was air conditioned was animals. So you got
to choose between shoveling **** and guts or bits. Since computers
obeyed everything you told them to do, wrestling with computers
was much easier and less risky than animals.

/BAH