Many years ago, in a world not far enough away...
Not on call as such, but I remember a visit to an MoD base who wanted to replace an aging PDP-11 system used as part of an armament stores system. The chap running the system proudly showed me the set of operating manuals that they followed to the letter, including the weekly backups. When I asked about these he opened a ceiling-height storage rack full of tapes, in the next room to the computer. OKaaay, I thought. He explained these tapes were written in some kind of ICL mainframe format so they could be read onto the system in a second nearby base if needed. How often did they test this process ? Oh they hadn't done that for a couple of years, since the other base got rid of their ICL mainframe.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
