Posts by NEJJ

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: Backup AND Restore

Backup *AND* Restore ?? Back in the early 80's, the Northern Telecom 445/585 system had a 'interesting' feature. Backup worked just fine. Coming to restore a few files from customer's system, it turned out the restore process first built a directory in memory of the entire tape before the restore process. Lots of files = run out of memory & restore program dies. The solution was to reconfigure the system to support just one screen & no printers making the OS smaller and more space for the 'directory' (no reference in the documentation of course). Just made it. Phew !!! (It also had the even more interesting feature of deleting all file indexes occasionally. I never did work out how to do this on purpose.)

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

dirty envirornent ?

We used a couple of Honeywell 'washing machines' in the early 80's. The factory was an iron foundry and *very* dirty due to the grinding of cast iron spreading graphite everywhere. Our procedure was to manually pull the heads up the loading ramps and clean the heads with alcohol every day. Woebetide him who pulled too far and the head all crashed together. This did happen but very rarely. The result was that we never suffered head crashed unlike a nearby site situated alongside lovely fields, no dust & no problems until they opened the windows when the rape seed was in flower, let in the pollen and overloaded the filters. To our amusement :-)

However there was a rule: never, never never put a disk in its case on the top of the disk drives. With the shaking in use it would fall off. Never, never, never means of course this did happen. The disk contained all the source code. There was a backup but not recent and the damaged" pack had a bent top platter a few mm out of true. "Please, please Mr Engineer can you help?". And he did, with us ready to press enter on a copy program while he manually loaded the heads. Sighs of relief !!

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Only affects insider program - Not correct

"This seems to apply to the 'Insider' program only" - No

I have a surface laptop & upgraded it to W10 Professional (it was part of the price) and suddenly - like 5 minutes ago - it tells me I have no license. I am not part of any w10 preview / test circle.

:-(