re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#23 Scary Sysprogs and educating those 'kids' http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#24 Scary Sysprogs and educating those 'kids'
after transferring to San Jose Research ... I was allowed to wandering around other locations in the area. One of the places was the disk engineering and development labs. At the time, they had a fare number of IBM mainframes (they would get one of the earliest engineering mainframe processors ... usually #3 or #4 for starting disk testings ... aka needing to test engineering disks ... but also needing to test engineering mainframes with latest disks). At the time the machine rooms were running all the mainframes 7x24 around the clock, stand-alone testing schedules. At one time, they had tried to use MVS to have operating system environment and being able to do multiple concurrent testing ... however in that environment, MVS had 15min MTBF. I offered to rewrite the I/O supervisor to make it bullet proof and never fail ... enabling on-demand, anytime, concurrent testing ... significantly improving disk development productivity. After that I would get sucked into diagnosing lots of development activity ... because frequently anytime there was any kind of problem ... they would accuse the software ... and I would get a call ... and have to figure out what the hardware problem was. old postsing about getting to play disk engineer in bldgs 14&15 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk I did a write up of what was necessary to support the environment and happened to make reference to the MVS 15min MTBF ... which brought down the wrath of the MVS RAS group on my head ... they would have gotten me fired if they could figure out how (I had tried to work with them to improve MVS RAS ... but instead they turned it into an adversary situation). A couple years later ... when 3380s starting to ship ... MVS system was hanging/failing (requiring re-IPL) in the FE 3380 error regression tests (typical errors expected to be found in customer installations) ... and in the majority of the cases, there was not even an indication of what was responsible for the failure (of course I had to be handling them all along ... since nearly all development was being done under systems I provided). old email from the period discussing MVS failures with FE 3380 error regression test: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801015 3380s had been announced 11June1980 http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
