Re:Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
by stickfigure on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:26PM
(#27566836)
Totally random story:
I was one of the beta testers for BSDI, in 1990 (long before Linux or FreeBSD). They sent me QIC-40 tapes that I used on my fancy new 386/33 with a SCSI tape system that I bought just for this purpose. The problem was, I kept getting weird data corruption - compiling anything would spit out random errors that obviously weren't in the source files.
After a few months of this, I gave up and installed OS/2 instead (from floppy!). It failed on install with a cryptic error message. I called OS/2 support, gave them the error code, and they asked "Do you have different speed memory modules installed?" Bingo, that was it. I never did install OS/2, but the install process was invaluable.
I didn't end up using BSDI much. Most of my work was on the CSC department's Pyramid timesharing system, so I just used a terminal on Windows (3.x). RIP polyslo.calpoly.edu.
I was one of the beta testers for BSDI, in 1990 (long before Linux or FreeBSD). They sent me QIC-40 tapes that I used on my fancy new 386/33 with a SCSI tape system that I bought just for this purpose. The problem was, I kept getting weird data corruption - compiling anything would spit out random errors that obviously weren't in the source files.
After a few months of this, I gave up and installed OS/2 instead (from floppy!). It failed on install with a cryptic error message. I called OS/2 support, gave them the error code, and they asked "Do you have different speed memory modules installed?" Bingo, that was it. I never did install OS/2, but the install process was invaluable.
I didn't end up using BSDI much. Most of my work was on the CSC department's Pyramid timesharing system, so I just used a terminal on Windows (3.x). RIP polyslo.calpoly.edu.