Re: Any disastrous or amusing upgrade stories?

For those of us who remember punched cards, we also remember to "sight check".
The IBM programming course for the 702 in 1954 spent two hours on error checking for each one hour on programming. The part of the course that gave most of the students trouble was the checking of the validity of a tape or card read.

Bobj

"Peter McMurray" <excalibur21@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:osKGm.51051$ze1.4227@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On A more Reliable note for those that remember punched cards and assembler. A programmer at a large steel mill in Wales spent six months writing his program and tracing a fault. Every time he ran the program it kicked off splendidly then the machine halted (more sad memories of Open Architecture) One day a great cheer rang around the programmers room he had found it. The procedure he had to follow in the end was to take the deck of cards and laboriously align every one with a ruler to check the code as punched. Bingo! one miss punch produced a command that only the system engineers knew about ; System Halt
Peter McMurray
"frosty" <frostyj@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:qtednWg3kvGMJ3TXnZ2dnUVZ_uSdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Oct 28, 7:07 pm, wjhonson <wjhon...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Previously, a tech had setup some kind of shortcut which would "wipe
the disk" (that's what they said) in preparation for a new install.
The shortcut was "\"

Kevin Powick wrote:
I worked on a system where somebody did that with the "D" key. Every
production file was cleared and re-loaded with a base set of data.
Not good.


<Eric Idle Voice>You were lucky! On our system, any one key command
would erase the entire hard drive and set the computer room on fire!</EIV>

--
frosty



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