Re:Sonification for monitoring and debugging distributed sys...
by rasur on Sunday September 04, 2016 @05:41PM
(#12426865)
I remember being taken on a tour of one of my companies data centers in 1987 (I was a newly inducted Ops Staff on MVS systems, back then) and when walking past an ICL mainframe, the guy showing us around pointed out a knob at the top of the casing; told us it was the volume control for a speaker. They used it to listen to the sound of the CPU (it was somehow wired up, I don't recall the specifics) and could tell if it had crashed or not.
Anecdotally, this was not an unknown concept to me. As a teen learning assembler on early 80's Z80 machines, one could literally hear the CPU fizzing through loops, copies etc, if one listened closely enough (80's Z80's were not fast :) )
Using sound, for monitoring of distributed systems was a hack-day project at work a couple of years back, but sadly never went anywhere. I'd much prefer to monitor my systems through an audible interface than a visual one, but I wonder how much of that is connected to my having been interested in audio in general over the years (in the capacity of audio engineering, music etc)
Anecdotally, this was not an unknown concept to me. As a teen learning assembler on early 80's Z80 machines, one could literally hear the CPU fizzing through loops, copies etc, if one listened closely enough (80's Z80's were not fast :) )
Using sound, for monitoring of distributed systems was a hack-day project at work a couple of years back, but sadly never went anywhere. I'd much prefer to monitor my systems through an audible interface than a visual one, but I wonder how much of that is connected to my having been interested in audio in general over the years (in the capacity of audio engineering, music etc)