Posts by TBi

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Very old Nixdorf backups

When I was very young I was hired in to "manage" a data centre of a small oil company. We had every sort of computer including some inherited Nixdorfs with some large tape reels. Every evening a small team used to come in to do the backups etc. They installed the tapes and then went off to enjoy their evening meal, paid for by us because the backups took so long. After some time they took the tapes off the system and stored them somewhere. Once I happened to be in the computer room and noted that the tapes were making a lot of backwards and forwards movements as if the tape drive was having problems. When the backup was finished I took the tape and had a look at it. It was very nearly transparent. Thus after persuading the computer centre boss to buy some new ones, we were able to do the backups in such a short period of time that no evening meal was required. The hired in group was not pleased.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

And the Z8000 had sort of two operating modes, one segmented and then the other sort of completely flat. At around the time it was available I was designing and building an OS for a now long gone Italian computer company and there were many debates as to which mode we should use. It was also touch and go as to whether we would use the Z8000 or the M68000. Eventually for various financial reasons the Z8000 was chosen and we were dissapointed although we did get a free Unix based system (based on Z8000) from Exxon to play with (and use).

As regards bugs, they were legendary. We were coding in C but had often to resort to assembly to work around the bugs. And when new devices became available, there were other bugs.

It kept us all amused....