On Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 9:54 PM Leonard D Woren <[email protected]>
wrote:


> This comes down to a problem with making sufficient resources
> available to developers and testers.  My sandbox system is a 4-way
> sysplex under VM.  There was an issue which looked like a bug but
> turned out to be an early design shortcoming from prior to my taking
> over that part of the product.  Some customers hit it on large systems
> but no matter how much I ran the tests on my sandbox, I could not
> trigger the problem.  Finally I got permission to try it on some other
> product's 7-way real LPAR system, and the problem hit on my first
> try.  And second try.  And third try.  So I was finally able to figure
> it out and fix the Day-0 design issue once I had sufficient resources
> available to encounter the problem.
>
> Back when the model 3 IBM 3800 paper eater (*), er, high-speed laser
> printer, came out (1983 give or take), we got one, did the IOCP
> update, connected it up, fired it up and JES2 abended S0C4. Reliably
> if I recall.  I ended up in direct communication with the IBM
> developer who wrote the code.  He sent me an APAR fix and said "try
> this and let me know if works."  Me: "Didn't you test it?" Him: "No, I
> don't have a 3800-3 on my VM system."  The bug turned out to be that
> he didn't take into account that the -3 had longer sense data than the
> -1, so when JES2 did a SENSE to the -3, it overlaid a few bytes of
> some other critical JES2 data.  If the developer had had an actual
> 3800-3, he would have tripped over this very early on.
>
> I rest my case.
>
> (*) The 3800 moved the continuous form paper at 8 feet per second.
> Astounding opportunity for paper cuts if you ignored the warning to
> not run it with the cover open.
>
> None of the above in any way justifies Clownstrike's shoddy code
> getting distributed.  I hope they get sued out of business.
>

This reminds me of that morning around 3 AM back in the early '80s when the
SE and I were pre-building VM in the K St. N.W. basement for its first
install on my employer's not-yet-delivered 4341 with 3370s. We found out
the hard way PID did not have any 3370s to test on.  My SE drove that phone
call, I just watched--I wouldn't have been as hard on them.

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