[HECnet] No connectivity to arsgea 4

[Thomas DeBellis]

>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On 1/23/21 11:54 AM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>>
>> Well, as a matter of fact, I myself told myself this, based on my 
>> anecdotal experience of 45 years in the field.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 1/23/21 12:40 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
>   In that case, please stay far, far away from soldering irons. ;)

Funny you should say that...  Back in the early '90's, I was co-founder 
of a company called Digital Dynamics and we made the first 64 track disk 
based recording system available anywhere, the ProDisk-464.  The maximum 
any competitor could do at the time was 24, at nearly four or 5 times 
our cost.  I designed and implemented the crash proof file system used 
for the sound storage.  So, lots of cool b-tree indexing code, real time 
requirements, device drivers.  Fun stuff.

    ...But...

Wire-wrap prototypes, flaky interrupts (did I mention how much I hate 
the 8259?) and other oddities.  One day, I couldn't quite hear some 
audio, so I reached into the wire bay with a long screw driver to adjust 
a pot on a particular DA converter. /And/ I happened to cross the leads 
on this /really/ big capacitor in the power supply...  The shock knocked 
me off my feet and 6 feet away flat out on my back.  Oddly enough, I 
didn't actually break anything on the test system and only had a sore 
bottom for about two days.  And I didn't get that big a lecture from the 
hardware designer, either.

>   A funny story about that.  In a large ISP environment in the 
> mid-1990s, suits smelled money and started infiltrating the company.  
> Of course, the predictable thing happened, everything went to shit.  
> Part of that process, though, was amusing.  The suits whined and 
> whined about "all of these overpriced Sun Microsystems computers that 
> we've never heard of". (we had over two thousand of them at that 
> point)  They whined that a PC costs $300, so why should we be buying 
> $15,000 Sun computers?
>
>   So they started buying PCs, just a few, maybe a dozen.  The $300 
> price they'd mentioned before was for eMachines garbage at Best Buy, 
> but what they actually ended up buying were monstrous $20,000 Compaq 
> ProLiant machines.  About 25% of the computing power in 5x the rack 
> space at a higher price, wow what a great decision! Idiot suits.  At 
> least they didn't break very often...only about twice as often as the 
> SPARCs.

This jogs another memory: at a hospital, I managed support for a number 
of medical practices on the campus and handled communications with the 
main hospital network.

Medical practices have similar requirements and these particular ones 
all ran the same scheduling, billing and records software. The initial 
meeting with each ran along similar lines, "Please explain how you make 
money" and after this was answered, "How much downtime can you afford?"  
Invariably, the answer to the 2^nd was a wide eyed, "None",  to which I 
responded, "OK, so go buy X, Y and Z and you pretty much won't 
experience any kind of extended outage or, more likely, /never/ have them"

X, Y and Z were an IBM eServer with RAID and backup, redundant 
conditioned power supplies and separate HVAC.  Now, the 8668 is in no 
way the answer to the world's ills, but in this case, due to other 
circumstances, it really was ridiculous to even consider anything else.  
Again, unique circumstances, likely unrepeatable. Yet the practices that 
did this got exactly what I told them. Zero outages.  Not a single one

    ...Except...

Talking to one particular owner was like talking to an open window.  
He'd nod sagely and then go do whatever he felt like.  So he went and 
bought a (you guessed it) Compaq workstation, _nothing_ else and then 
ran the entire office office off that, a task that it was utterly 
unsuited for.  So, short term, Yes--they saved the up front costs.  On 
the other hand, they were forever having capacity issues until the poor 
thing finally gave up the ghost, turning the entire practice into a 
paper operation for the several days it took to put everything back 
together.

Yep; there is nothing like doing something you're not qualified to do, 
whether or not you're a scoundrel.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/hecnet-list/attachments/20210124/1e45c0f8/attachment-0001.htm>