Re:The Night Watch [pdf]
by MaysonL on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @06:27PM
(#34525652)
Reading this triggered so many memories of system programming disasters and victories I have seen and participated in:
The circular disk output buffer which emulated Ouroboros and eating its own tail, started sending patient data back to the wrong hospital
The minicomputer which stopped working (while I was programming it), because a chip had disappeared from the CPU backplane
The only soldering I ever committed (which my boss disparaged as really ugly when he returned from giving the demo which that soldering had saved) which enabled me to debug a race condition in a distributed OS I was coding, by creating an RS-232 null modem so I could run two copies of the OS on the same microVAX
The circular disk output buffer which emulated Ouroboros and eating its own tail, started sending patient data back to the wrong hospital
The minicomputer which stopped working (while I was programming it), because a chip had disappeared from the CPU backplane
The only soldering I ever committed (which my boss disparaged as really ugly when he returned from giving the demo which that soldering had saved) which enabled me to debug a race condition in a distributed OS I was coding, by creating an RS-232 null modem so I could run two copies of the OS on the same microVAX
And too many more to bore you with.