As usual, half of the story is the truth and rest is bullshit. "bonuses all around" - good one. I suppose they had a last supper scene too, with dollar bills on the dinner table?

I forget the term for this type of journalism. It's been previously said on HN that it's almost a rule for on-call stories to be embellished beyond reason.

Interesting style of story-telling that seems to flips the chronology of the lie being told about time to fix (2 weeks) and the contractor being fired. Can't help but think if "Ellen" were honest about timeframes --- which a competent professional should be, even in the face of an obvious professional advantage --- then nobody need have lost their jobs for the mistaken attempt to progress the struggling project.

> And when you cloned the disks, you changed the DECNet address on each PC?

Kind of odd that the entire fail safe seems to depend on self-declared addresses.

As opposed to one assigned on the basis of a self-declared MAC address?

I find it much more odd -- if not surprising, particularly in the pager era -- that the whole thing, every component of it, was completely locked in to one vendor. Not just the VAX cluster and the PCs, but even the network protocol.

This was not unusual decades ago, but it was always insane.

That's fair, but a hardcoded address in a disk clone seems like a quick point of failure.