Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope
- Reference: 1599203816
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/04/on_call/
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The tale comes courtsey of "Keith", a Data Systems Technician for the US Navy, who told us he was "officially trained as a combat computer repair technician". He also considered himself a bit of a hobbyist where PCs were concerned.
He had been stationed at a Naval Research facility, the last duty station before his retirement, and while the majority of the facility's population were blessed with bachelor degrees or higher qualifications, Keith lacked one, having not been too interested in academia but possessed of "an avid curiosity about hardware (all kinds) with a special interest in computers and programming".
The job was an easy one, with little to do until the warm embrace of retirement beckoned.
Keith's story took place sometime between 1993 and 1996. The official desktop computers were either Sun boxes or Intel 386-based PCs running Windows 3.1. Windows 95 was also being evaluated and some machinery running IBM's OS/2 were sprinkled into the mix. The (new for the time) network could just about manage speeds of 1Mb/s.
Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher [2]READ MORE
Our tale, however, concerns email running on that bastion of stability: Windows 3.1.
"We were running the Eudora email program under WinSock TCP networking stack," recalled Keith, adding: "Keep in mind, Windows at this time was still not a true multi-tasking operating system and the computer was still a single core setup with threads not even a dream yet."
Younglings not familiar with Eudora may be interested to learn the email software harked back to the late 1980s prior to acquisition by Qualcomm in the early 1990s. Originally free, it was swiftly commercialised, although a "Lite" incarnation persisted and Eudora gained quite the following. Sadly, things [3]looked a little iffy as the century turned, and by 2006 Qualcomm [4]handed over development to Mozilla. Qualcomm would eventually [5]pass the email client's source code to the Computer History Museum in 2018.
But back in the carefree days of the 1990s, Eudora was a force to be reckoned with. That said, Windows being Windows, on the day in question it was performance that Keith was called out to deal with.
"My computer is running really slow," whined a department head.
Keith pitched up and peered at the computer. Incredibly, the bigwig was running sanctioned apps only – Office, Eudora and so on. "Just the normal stuff," Keith said.
Our hero ran some tests. Windows 3.1 appeared to be running normally, just really, really slowly.
After watching the poor thing thrash itself, Keith found the issue. Eudora was set to check for email every minute.
Those spared Microsoft's earlier versions of Windows will not be aware of what happens when a so-called background task runs. In this case, no processing would happen until the task was complete. "Although we were fully locally hosted with internet services including our own email server, it can still take some time (albeit measured in seconds) for network activity," recalled Keith.
Keith asked why, exactly, Eudora needed to check for mail once a minute?
"In case someone needs something right now and can't wait. I need to be able to respond in a timely fashion!" came the retort.
In later decades the bigwig would get his wish as the world decided that anyone with an internet connection must be available at all times of the day and night, and subject to a succession of increasingly hysterical "PLS RESPOND" messages if a reply is not immediately forthcoming.
Back in the 1990s, however, Keith simply pointed out that the department head was also possessed of a telephone and anyone needing anything really urgently could simply use that.
Simpler times.
He set Eudora back to a less stressful once-every-10-minutes check.
"Needless to say, the computer started working reasonably normally after that (relatively speaking – this is early Microsoft after all)."
Ever been called out to deal with some self-inflicted silliness? Or had to explain the inner workings of Windows to a mighty brain? Of course you have, and you should share your story with an email to [6]On Call . ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/28/on_call/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/1999/01/29/qualcomm_to_drop_eudora/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/11/eudora_becomes_open_source/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/23/finally_historic_eudora_code_goes_open_source/
[6] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Perhaps
Hourly should be more than enough for most businesses.
For home use, once or twice per day.
Unless you WANT to be a slave to email, that is ...
Re: Unless you WANT to be a slave to email, that is ...
Don 't kink shame me
Re: Perhaps
I use a similar priority, with the exception that WhatsApp voice messages are classified at the same level as email. If you can't be bothered to write it, it can't be that urgent.
Re: Perhaps
Phone instant.
Email a few hours to a few days, with mounting apologies for any days past 3.
SMS I tend to totally ignore, choose phone or email.
I try to avoid WhatsApp for work, but if you do any work in Africa then WhatsApp is the de facto method of business communication. So WhatsApp=Email if you are African, and WhatsApp=SMS if you are not.
Re: Perhaps
Sadly, these days your personal Gmail and Hotmail get pushed to your mobile device apps. by default. It takes some scrabbling around to turn notifications off, or a little effort to set up a proper email client instead. Is it pub time yet? Aeroplane mode on...
Re: Perhaps
Yet I still manage to not even notice anything but the phone ringing. I wait for my wife to answer that.
The joy of living in an age where 'dealing with the mail' means bulk deleting it with as little effort as possible once a month or so.
Back in those days I used to get my email using an old compact Mac. You know the kind - black and white screen, 512*342 resolution. Even though it was running a proper pre-emptive multitasking OS (A/UX), I didn’t much fancy bogging it down with email clients and whatnot. So I did what every other similiarly minded computer user did back in the day, regardless of the make, model and OS of their computer. I logged in to the email server and used its own built in pine (or elm - I can’t remember. Actually, I think that it was elm) email client.
Happy days, the days before email got all clagged up with pictures, emojis, html etc. Just, nice, plain, simple text.
I still use (al)pine for my email needs. It's an old friend, the fingers know it well. Still maintained, too ... "stable" was last updated on June 19th.
When we moved from our departmental hosted email to GroupWise (shudder) as a result of management wanting to standardize, one of the first questions the users asked was "Can we get Elm or Pine working with it?".
Stop pressing enter!
When I was working in the machine room on one problem, the operations people had a different problem - their system would not IPL.
The theory was that you dial in the IPL address (yes, that old) , press the load button, press enter on the operator console and the system would prompt for IPL parameters.
The problem was that nothing was displayed on the operator console.
We all went out for some "fresh air" - while the operators had a smoke. When we came back we passed an office with someone sitting at a screen with the IPL prompt, so we all did a right wheel and asked him what was going on. The poor guy said "I dont know.... I keep getting this screen". It turned out that he was sitting there pressing the enter key as fast as he could, and so he was getting the operator console.
He was educated to wait until the logon screen came up, before pressing enter.
Problem solved.
This is one of those classes of problems where the solution is to do nothing!
Re: Stop pressing enter!
I had a classic do nothing fix.
I was senior enough to do things, but still junior enough to be sent out to the back of beyond and do stuff ( I loved it!) and was in Indonesia. The task was to merge their GroupWise with the main office GroupWise systems.
I had the local local guy, the local regional guy and me the "big shot from the UK" (that was probably close to what they thought of me, not what I thought of me which was wow free trip to Indonesia).
I was pre warned do double check everything because if you hit GO and then cancel, or it stops be prepared for World Wide Pain (TM)
So we checked, double checked and hit Go.
After half an hour there was nothing, no sign we had hit the button, no indication at all. not even a whirleygig the cheapskates.
After an hour the locals were getting nervous and wondering if something had gon wrong and should they cancel it and try again.
Given that we were doing this over a bit of wet string, I stated loudly that I was hungry and it was time for my dinner. "but the merge...." but I was resolute in wanting my dinner. or more to the point to take away the temptation for one of us to try and cancel it.
a couple of hours fighting through the local traffic, an nice evening meal, and fighting back, we came to the on screen message of merge complete 0 errors.
And that is how going for lunch can merge a system...
Beers becasue we had them after obvs...
Re: Stop pressing enter!
Nice story! Just in case there's anyone here who uses stuff without a progress bar, you might be interested in this:-
https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv
It lets you know if you have time for a swift half --->
Re: Stop pressing enter!
From that page:
"Frequent use of this third form is not recommended as it may cause the programmer to overheat."
I love the humor quietly embedded in documentation...
Self-Inflicted Silliness
When I was but a lad I managed to take the family Windows 3.1 machine out of action with a little impatience. I'd decided I didn't want to keep taking the time to find the shortcut for a game I was playing a lot, so I moved the shortcut to the Startup folder.
This was A Bad Move as it was a DOS game, and of course back in those days Windows shut down to run DOS programs. The machine then became a box solely dedicated to running that game as exiting the game would start up Windows again, but Windows would then run the game on startup causing Windows to immediately shut down again.
Needless to say my Dad took the opportunity to update the PC to Windows 95.
Re: Self-Inflicted Silliness
I once disabled my uncle's CD ROM drive for a couple over year by editing the resources file so I could get the sound working in Wolfenstein on his 386 ;-)
In my defence, I did fix it next time I was there, but seeing they lived in a different continent, we weren't exactly over weekly.
Re: Self-Inflicted Silliness
IRQs / DMA settings for the sound card I assume?
My memory is fuzzy on these matters.
Re: Self-Inflicted Silliness
That's the bitty! It was back in the early 90s, so memory is equally as fuzzy...
Re: Self-Inflicted Silliness
Yeah, I did something similar once. In a bid to boost adoption of OS/2, IBM gave away a product called OS/2 for Windows on the cover of a UK magazine (PCW perhaps?). Excited to try the new hotness, and given that my computers at the time (an 8086 powered Deskpro or a Mac) didn't meet the requirements, I commandeered my dad's 486.
Er. Error.
To this day, I don't know what I did wrong. All I know is that after installation, and despite being well in spec, the blasted thing wouldn't boot. I booted up using an MS-DOS 5 boot floppy and…
…discovered that the OS/2 installer had, for some reason, flattened all of the system directory tree and splattered itself (and Windows) over the root of hard disk. What a mess.
The only bright spot was that the directories containing my fathers work were in tact. So I was able to backup to a 44MB Syquest disk and reinstall. Very annoying and a definite squeaky bottom moment. I didn't mess with OS/2 again. Clearly it and me were never meant to be friends - but I still have the installer disk on my desk to remind me of the perils of diving in without first reading the documentation and making a backup.
Re: Self-Inflicted Silliness
I think you're right about PCW - it was a massive tomb back then and I spent ages lusting after all the hardware I definitely couldn't buy as a kid.
You do learn your most important lessons from those moments though, so it's good you managed it on a system you had no issues accessing and were also able to fix it!
Instant Email (Not!)
Back in the 90s the company I'd recently joined as IS Manager was at least ahead of the game in having some Ethernet* connected desktops as well as the 3270 terminals; the email however relied on individual dial up modems on a few computers. A leased line to the 'net was way out of budget so instead I found a dedicated network email server box that used ISDN. To keep the call costs down it polled for new messages and sent outgoing ones every 15 minutes.
Inevitably I had the HR Manager late afternoon/early evening come storming in complaining that an email she'd sent to the US hadn't been received yet (about 5 minutes after she'd sent it!) I checked the queues at our end to see if I needed to push it through manually but no, it had already left the building. It then took several minutes to calmly explain that email is not instantaneous, that there was nothing I could do about it and that the likely source of the delay was the receiving end at the corporate headquarters.
*The old thin wire setup with make-before-break plugs and sockets so we could take a single PC off the network without crashing the whole thing!
Re: Instant Email (Not!)
25+ years later I can sit at home in the UK and manage the email settings on an network in Australia!
Re: Instant Email (Not!)
25 years ago, I had been managing email settings on networks in Europe from my home in California for around a decade and a half. ( delivermail on 3BSD in late '79.).
Re: Instant Email (Not!)
I maintained dial-up UUCP links for a couple of non-profits until the dawn of the year 2000. They used Pegasus for their MUA, and a local mail spool, connecting to the MTA hourly. I handled the MTA on my end with Sendmail and an always-on connection. The system wasn't b0rken by Y2K, but they both decided to wake up and join the 20th Century to celebrate the beginning of the 21st with an on-demand dial-up TCP/IP connection to one of my routers. They both still use that system ... I've offered to upgrade them for free, but not needing much Web access they see no real need.
Re: Individual Email (Not!)
Before I joined my employer back in the late 90's they had only one email address! Which was donated by a neighboring University. Quite a few people used it, so every subject line for each message you sent began with your name, I only know this tidbit as my former boss, god rest his soul, would slip back into that old way of doing things, and put his name in the subject line. I've never heard of it before or since...
Re: Individual Email (Not!)
Pre 2000....
Head Office had the nice stuff - proper email server etc etc Novell 386 (Lotus cc:Mail and then MS Exchange)
We in the technical office had .... what ever we had to hand, so WfW 3.11, so we could do things like fax from desktop (gasp!) and they couldn't! For email we had a shareware email server that used a single POP3 emai address, but somehow analysed the emails and send it to the correct people. Flosietech? Flosietek? Something like that
Memories
Ah, good memories of using Eudora on my Mac back in the 90s.
Got a call one weekend and the conversation went like this:
Caller: My name is
Sure enough, I had no access to that site ... wait. Something's not right.
Me: What site are you again?
Caller:
I have heard of that site before. Checked my emails ... yup. There it is.
Me: Is there power to the site?
Caller: Uhhhh ... No. They are doing power maintenance downstairs.
Wait for it ... wait for it.
Caller: Oh.
Deserved a good BOFHing
That's the kind of user who clearly deserves to get up close and personal with the stained end of a bulk eraser or cattle prod...
Or maybe they'd care to inspect the Halon system in operation?
Now that's a title
Depending on how you group it:
combat computer-repair-technician (impressive, like a black belt, gun toting commando BOFH, strapping mines to misbehaving machines - or users... )
A Keyboard Killer...
... Providing you've got one of the early IBM keyboards you stand a good change in any hand-to-hand combat.
Re: Now that's a title
Or someone capable of reformatting and re-installing Windows for Battlegroups while under fire...
Couple of years ago I wrote an e-mail service connected to our application, and thanks to a fault, it got stuck in a loop sending error messages to my boss.
Kudos(?) to SendGrid, which didn't even wince under the sheer load of infinite e-mails, going to my boss's phone. It was an iphone, and couldn't even use it because the sheer volume of incoming mail rendered it inoperative, except for incessantly beeping new e-mail over and over.
I believe he took it into an apple store, where they were able to disable the e-mail client long enough for him to call me. Much to my relief he wasn't angry, just concerned. I switched off the service until it could be fixed, and when I looked through the source code, I saw my own TODO saying to implement something just in case it goes rogue. It was a startup, fast and loose, get the product out of the door so there were many such TODOs.
When I went back there four years later, for a brief bit of work, I found the same TODO staring me in the face, along with pretty much every other one I'd put in. Some habits never change.
contactable at all times
I should send you the bill for my shrink because you've brought back a lot of bad memories! In another industry, I had a pager for 2 years, hell would have been a picnic.
Re: contactable at all times
I found pagers were very unreliable, especially on Friday afternoons!
Re: contactable at all times
And when *ahem* safely stored in a metal biscuit tin...
Re: contactable at all times
Pagers were (are, amazingly) a broadcast fire-and-forget system. There's no feedback to the network or sender as to whether a page was received. You could just have taken the battery out rather than risk exposing it when reaching for a biscuit.
History...
I am not sure about 1994 or 1995 (by then Linux was my primary platform, but mail retrieval details are fuzzy in my mind), but I am pretty sure that in 1996 - still within the stated time period of the story - fetchmail -d 60 was no problem at all even for multiuser machines. Checking mail every minute was, however, considered absolutely unnecessary, so fetchmail -d 180 was normal for me and my colleagues.
Perhaps
If the minimum interval possible to configure had been in the order of 5-10 minutes, perhaps people wouldn't have come to expect email to be instant?
I still honour the hierarchy of priorities: telephone call for "urgent, must respond now" stuff; SMS for "ASAP but not necessarily immediate"; email for "FYI" or "sometime in the next 2 days" stuff. Yes, I also introduce unnecessary delays to get the point across.