[TUHS] Who said ...

[Norman Wilson]

Clem Cole:

  I believe the line was:  *"running **DEC Diagnostics is like kicking a dead
  whale down the beach.*"
  As for who said it, I'm not sure, but I think it was someone like Rob
  Kolstad or Henry Spencer.

=====

The nearest I can remember encountering before was a somewhat
different quote, attributed to Steve Johnson:

Running TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach.

Since scj is on this list, maybe he can confirm that part.

I don't remember hearing it applied to diagnostics.  I can
imagine someone saying it, because DEC's hardware diags were
written by hardware people, not software people; they required
a somewhat arcane configuration language, one that made more
sense if you understood how the different pieces of hardware
connected together.

I learned to work with it and found it no less usable than,
say, the clunky verbose command languages of DEC's operating
systems; but I have always preferred to think in low levels.

DEC's diags were far from perfect, but they were a hell of a
lot better than the largely-nonexistent diags available for
modern Intel-architecture systems.  I am right now dealing
with a system that has an intermittent fault, that causes
the OS to crash in the middle of some device driver every
so often.  Other identical systems don't, so I don't think
it's software.  Were it a PDP-11 or a VAX I'd fire up the
diagnostics for a while, and have at least a chance of spotting
the problem; today, memtest is about the only such option,
and a solid week of running memtest didn't shake out anything
(reasonably enough, who says it's a memory problem?).

Give me XXDP, not just the Blue Screen of Death.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON