[TUHS] AOS and IBM/RT [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Arnold Robbins
>
>     > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
>
> And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
> courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site
> once,
> whereupon hilarity ensued.
>
One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story.   We were
chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging
Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem).  But we could not get
the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system
recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases
and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.

I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess?? put
out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a bunch
of information.  Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we got the
needed data, as they reported the error.  But it was a high visibility
customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call.   Fossil (our
boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he defended us to the
President.   We found the bug ;-)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20191121/6b23be50/attachment.html>