The Most Obsolete Infrastructure Money Can Buy
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Pretty amazing blog. Even worse than that one nasty contract I did last year.
You might wonder a bit about the viability of the VAX as computing platform in the year 2005. Especially for something as cpu-bound as compiling. But don't worry, one of my new coworkers had as their current task evaluating whether this should be migrated to VMS/Alpha or to VMS/VAX running under a VAX emulator on x86-64!
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Now, you might wonder about the wisdom of relying on segment registers heavily in the year 2005. After all use of segment registers had been getting slower and slower with every generation of CPUs, and in x86-64 the segmentation support was essentially removed. But don't worry, there was a project underway to migrate all of this code to run on Solaris instead
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After a couple of months of twiddling my thumbs and mostly reading up on all this mysterious infrastructure, a huge package arrived addressed to this compiler project. But... We were supposed to get a source dump. Why does the package need two men to carry it? Did somebody play a practical joke on us, and send the source as printouts?
Why it's the server that we'll use for compiling one of the compiler suites once we get the source code! A Intel System/86 with a genuine 80286 CPU, running Intel Xenix 286 3.5. The best way to interface with all this computing power is over a 9600 bps serial port.
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We had a VAX running a business critical system until the end of 2013.
A couple of years before we tried to find replacement hardware as a backup in case it failed - took 6 months to find one, and it came from eBay.
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Shit, I just binned A whole load of DEC / VAX / ALPHA spares including a fully working 3100, a few days ago 'cos I thought nobody would need them.
I may still have an exabyte or two, and a TK (IIRC) drive plust some SCSI "1" stuff kicking around.
And a 1GB SCSI drive with bootable "open license" VMS on (standard engineering password, which I have forgotten)
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Shortly after that escapade, we discovered that elsewhere in the company a similar but close enough VAX had been binned for the same assumption shortly before
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All of this infrastructure was just going to be on life support while it was being replaced by new systems that would in turn be obsoleted in five years. But nothing would ever actually go away, all this cruft would just accumulate and accumulate, nominally supported for ever.
This reminds me of Deepness in the Sky, where Pham Nuwen goes spelunking in the software to uncover ancient cruft that no one else knew about and gave him the edge on the bad guys.
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ah. that was a good book. I should go read it again.
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Spelunking?
As in, he hit the tilde key, and typed killall
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Good story, but I was distracted by his insistent strange usage of "ingenious".
Well, they had their own ingenious in-house programming language that you could think of as an imperative Erlang with a Pascal-like syntax that was compiled to C source [1].
Did he mean "indigenous"?
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This reminds me of Deepness in the Sky, where Pham Nuwen goes spelunking in the software to uncover ancient cruft that no one else knew about and gave him the edge on the bad guys.
I once had a great idea for a scene in a virtual reality where a guy hides from the baddies by forcing the rendering engine to go into its lowest compatibility mode-- which is the polygon-based room arrangement that games like Doom and Marathon used, which also coincidentally allowed for overlapping rooms.
Like in this famous multiplayer Marathon map:
Thus the good guys can hide in safety and the bad guys, even with tracking devices, can't find them because they're "at the same place" but not. Because the bad guys don't know about the legacy rendering modes.
Anyway the story went nowhere, but that was still a good idea.
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Did he mean "indigenous"?
Seriously, or...?
Are you like those guys who see the word "inane" and are like, "surely you meant to type "insane"!
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Did he mean "indigenous"?
I assumed he chose that word deliberately and that it was sarcasm.
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I assumed he chose that word deliberately and that it was sarcasm.
It's strange either way.
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@FrostCat said:
I assumed he chose that word deliberately and that it was sarcasm.
It's strange either way.
Indigenous would have been weirder:
in·gen·ious
inˈjēnyəs/Submit
adjective
(of a person) clever, original, and inventive.
"he was ingenious enough to overcome the limited budget"
synonyms: inventive, creative, imaginative, original, innovative, pioneering, resourceful, enterprising, inspired; More
(of a machine or idea) cleverly and originally devised and well suited to its purpose.As @FrostCat says, it seems like obvious sarcasm and not weird at all.
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obvious sarcasm
Considering the source--I assume that @cartman82 speaks ESL--I chose to assume[1] the sarcasm was not obvious.
[1] lot of that in this post, but at least I'm pointing it out instead of leaving it there to give myself an excuse to rant about people misunderstanding me, like nobody I'll mention here.
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Not compatible enough, representation in ASCII characters required on a TTY Device!
Actually, what map is that?
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What are you talking about.
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forcing the rendering engine to go into its lowest compatibility mode
Shirley, you can render more compatibility in Text Mode, eh?
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What the fuck are you talking about.
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Well, I thought we were talking about environment rendering engines, but now I'm not so sure...
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Brillant!
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Cool. Should have known it would have come from something I haven't plaid.
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Cool. Should have known it would have come from something I haven't plaid.
You go around applying plaid to things? Why?
Filed Under: This post has been plaid. Pray I do not plaid it any further.
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14 posts were merged into an existing topic: Obsolete Plaid
If you want to respond to plaid stuff, go there.
