This page was written from memory nearly 25 years later, on 18 February 2011
What a weekend! It has been a really tiring week, and I was looking forward to some
relaxation. And then I get a call from somebody at \PALACE, our London office, to
tell me that a disk had failed with some kind of corruption, and that the entire mail system
had gone down with it. Backups? What do you mean backups? This is a fault tolerant,
NonStop system!
We had programs for this, of course, but they had been declared obsolete when we introduced
the new disk process, DP2. It couldn't fail. And pigs have wings. But recover didn't work on it; it wasn't necessary. Today was the day
that I had to update it.
Spent the whole day working on the \PALACE crash. It paid off: by the evening the
mail system was back up, and I was even more exhausted than yesterday. And that with
Roberto Tomasi coming up from Milano tomorrow to investigate the strangenesses at Italsider in Taranto. How will I keep my eyes open?
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