Posts by beaker633

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: I'm curious...

Wow - that takes me back. My first real job included writing a bunch of HP-IB drivers (inclduing the base HPIB card driver) for different pieces of test equipment at the old (long since bulldozered) BAe/Sperry Gyroscope factory in Bracknell. It was all quite cool ... to test laser gyro Inertial Navigation Systems.

I seem to remember trying not to kill Michael Hesletine who was defence secretary at the time. For some reason the powers that be decided it was a good idea to seat him on our 3 axis test table and pretend that we were moving him. There were so many ways it could have gone wrong ... large test able to move in multiple directions at high speed. Fairly high power lasers.. all driven by software that was still a bit flakey. For safety, we decided it was better to unplug everything and just lie.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Funny... my recollection of tape is fairly happy :) ... although I worked designing them for HP in Bristol. Started working on cartridge tapes .. then DAT .. then LTO .... kept me in gainful employment all through the '90s.

Good times ...

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

dredged up guilty memories.

One of my memorable (at least to me) screw ups was very similar.

In the early nineties I worked for a large blue logo'd computer company in Bristol. We were growing at pace then and were connecting lots of workstations to the network. I was off to Japan at the weekend (another story) and needed to get a few workstations attached. So Friday afternoon (can't remember if this was after the pub but it may have been) cut a few co-ax cables, pop on the connectors, connect everything up, check it worked (well sort of), move everything back in place and go home to pack.

If you notice the order above ... you'll see my error.

Anyway when I get to Japan there are some urgent messages... I think most of the R&D dept couldn't use their workstations for some time while a someone traced where the issue was. I still feel guilty about that....

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Unhelpful comments

Ah that brought back memories. I worked on a system in the mid 80's (just it was incredibly obsolete then..) which was an X ray thickness gauge for steelmills. Real time, multitasking code written in assembler. The gauges were sold around the world and if anything went wrong with the code, we would (try and) figure out what was happening remotely and create a patch. All the debugging was by telephone/telex ( :) who remembers that) and then a patch was sent out via telex which was keyed in an empty part of EEPROM. Then 0xFF was overwritten into the EEPROM at the appropriate place to jump to the patch.

Most challenging job I ever had....