Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Bill Woodger]

The Sharky seems to be a "column" type thing. The "fish" are the people who 
provide the stories. Reality-check not required, as long as the story will be 
"popular".

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Tom Marchant]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:39:29 -0500, Bill Woodger wrote:

>I think there's at best a great deal of "faulty memory" here.

This story was posted by the same person who posted this:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3099975/data-center/blue-screen-of-death-mainframe-style.html#tk.drr_mlt
which was discussed at length a while ago and found to be inconsistent with 
reality.

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Tom Marchant

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[R.S.]

W dniu 2016-10-12 o 00:26, Charles Mills pisze:

Ha! You can download COMMAND.COM here 
http://www.allbootdisks.com/disk_contents/dos.html. The 1988 MS-DOS 3.3 variant 
is 25.3K



Every .COM file was limited to 64kB size. That's .EXE which could be 
larger.


BTW: The story about "idiot user who destroyed COMMAND.COM" can be 
related to CEO, board member, gay, black, Jude, Pole, German, Russian, 
woman or any other group you want to offend.


BTW2: What about copyright of the MS-DOS? IMHO it's still valid.

BTW3: I still have machines with MS-DOS installed. v6.20.

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Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland






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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Charles Mills]

Ha! You can download COMMAND.COM here 
http://www.allbootdisks.com/disk_contents/dos.html. The 1988 MS-DOS 3.3 variant 
is 25.3K

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Charles Mills
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2016 3:21 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

> COMMAND.COM in the late 80s was way smaller than 65K

Good grief! Indeed, the minimum IBM PC was 16K! ("Pricing started at US$1,565 
(equivalent to $4,073 in 2015) for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics 
Adapter, and no disk drives." -- 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#Debut) 

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Charles Mills]

> COMMAND.COM in the late 80s was way smaller than 65K

Good grief! Indeed, the minimum IBM PC was 16K! ("Pricing started at US$1,565 
(equivalent to $4,073 in 2015) for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics 
Adapter, and no disk drives." -- 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#Debut) 

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Bill Woodger
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2016 1:39 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

I think there's at best a great deal of "faulty memory" here. Something was 
nagging, so I just did a bit of research. COMMAND.COM in the late 80s was way 
smaller than 65K.

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Bill Woodger]

I think there's at best a great deal of "faulty memory" here. Something was 
nagging, so I just did a bit of research. COMMAND.COM in the late 80s was way 
smaller than 65K.

Remembering that a backup copy has been saved, what did the clever PC expert 
do? Deleted the backup, and copied COMMAND.COM from their own floppy. That's 
technical know-how.

In 1988 where I worked selected users had COMPAQs. Stand-alone (no network) and 
pre-installed. There was no "PC Support", the users were just left to get on 
with it. The guys who "installed" (brought the machine to a desk, plugged it 
all in, and turned the power on) had little clue beyond the power button and 
Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Perhaps it was different elsewhere?

Anyway, just another case of "anything anti-Mainframe must be true, regardless 
of anything inconvenient like facts and knowledge".

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Joel C. Ewing]

On 10/10/2016 04:17 PM, Mark Post wrote:
 On 10/7/2016 at 08:09 AM, Tom Marchant
> <000a2a8c2020-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: 
>> To paraphrase the article,
>> "Mainframe people are stupid and too snobbish to learn from us enlightened 
>> PC weenies."
> I took it more like "Mainframe people don't know as much as they think they 
> do and are too arrogant to ask for help."  :)
>
>
> Mark Post
>
>
Did no one else notice the original article described the one who
trashed his PC as a "mainframe programmer", not a Mainframe Systems
Programmer or Mainframe Technical Support?   By the time PCs came
around, a mere Mainframe Programmer should not have had the access to
trash things on the mainframe that would break the Operating System or
prevent an IPL, or even decide if an IPL was appropriate.  Might it not
be natural for such a person to assume, until finding out otherwise,
that surely this new PC would be a step forward, not a step backward,
and have similar protective safeguards built in?  The terse nature of
much early PC documentation didn't help a new user from the mainframe
world grok the fragile nature of the beast.

My take is that the article was probably written  by someone unfamiliar
with the mainframe philosophy of restricting access to critical system
files to those actually responsible for their maintenance -- to those
who have been trained to understand the risks and how to minimize them. 
Those without the knowledge were not allowed to play with dangerous
things in the mainframe world.
Joel C. Ewing


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Joel C. Ewing,Bentonville, AR   jcew...@acm.org 

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Mark Post]

>>> On 10/7/2016 at 08:09 AM, Tom Marchant
<000a2a8c2020-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: 
> To paraphrase the article,
> "Mainframe people are stupid and too snobbish to learn from us enlightened 
> PC weenies."

I took it more like "Mainframe people don't know as much as they think they do 
and are too arrogant to ask for help."  :)


Mark Post

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Tom Brennan]

I did about the same:  My first x86 box came with an apparent pirate 
copy of Win 3.1 (no install disks) and I accidentally deleted all the 
files in C:\WINDOWS.  With UNDELETE you have to know the first character 
of the original filename, so for the ones I couldn't guess I called up 
my brother and asked him to check his own 3.1 system.  Eventually I was 
back in business.


Mike Schwab wrote:

Yep.  Helped a co-worker who deleted all the files in the C:\
directory on Win 95 about 1997.  Undeleted most files and rebooted
with system disk and restored IO.SYS, etc with special command from
floppy.  Help desk was taking a long time to come over to fix it.



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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Mike Schwab]

Yep.  Helped a co-worker who deleted all the files in the C:\
directory on Win 95 about 1997.  Undeleted most files and rebooted
with system disk and restored IO.SYS, etc with special command from
floppy.  Help desk was taking a long time to come over to fix it.

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 7:46 AM, Elardus Engelbrecht
 wrote:
> Mark Regan wrote:
>
>>http://www.computerworld.com/article/3126852/data-center/is-this-why-mainframes-almost-never-get-rebooted.html
>
> Funny and plausible war story! ;-)
>
> It reminds me of an a$$hole who edited his autoexec.bat to contains only one 
> line which has the program name which he wants to run after reboot.
>
> Unfortunately for him that file also PREVIOUSLY contained some setup 
> statements for memory management, path, environment variables and other 
> things...
>
> So, reboot failed of course. Of course, I had to fix it by using a floppy to 
> boot with.
>
> ;-)
>
> Groete / Greetings
> Elardus Engelbrecht
>
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-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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Re: Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Elardus Engelbrecht]

Mark Regan wrote:

>http://www.computerworld.com/article/3126852/data-center/is-this-why-mainframes-almost-never-get-rebooted.html

Funny and plausible war story! ;-)

It reminds me of an a$$hole who edited his autoexec.bat to contains only one 
line which has the program name which he wants to run after reboot.

Unfortunately for him that file also PREVIOUSLY contained some setup statements 
for memory management, path, environment variables and other things...

So, reboot failed of course. Of course, I had to fix it by using a floppy to 
boot with.

;-)

Groete / Greetings
Elardus Engelbrecht

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Fwd: Shark Tank: Is this why mainframes almost never get rebooted?

[Mark Regan]

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3126852/data-center/is-this-why-mainframes-almost-never-get-rebooted.html

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