Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good
- Reference: 1605514505
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/16/who_me/
- Source link:
Today's tale comes from a Reg reader we'll call "Simon." Our man was spending 1973 toiling away as a computer operator for an American city. The city was big enough to justify splashing some dollars on a new Burroughs B-6700 mainframe "and we were still learning the magnificent multi-cpu, multi-tasking operating system known as MCP."
It was heady stuff. The [2]Burroughs B-6700 was an unusual beast; eschewing machine code in favour of higher level languages. [3]ALGOL was a particular favourite, although application languages such as COBOL were on offer.
The operating system, the Master Control Program - not to be confused with the fictitious computer program villain from [4]Tron - was also an innovation. Multiple programs could share the system and more than one processor could run programs. Now approaching 60 years since its initial release, vestiges of the OS can still be found lurking on the [5]Unisys website in ClearPath MCP Release 19 guise.
Back in 1973, Simon was using the mainframe to run billing jobs for the city-owned electricity utility. "This generated 20,000 - 30,000 bills each night," he explained, "the billing program sent the output to a printer backup tape which was then printed using a system utility."
At this point, it is worth noting that a "feature" of this particular edition of the MCP was the automatic restart of certain system utilities after system fault and reboot.
"One of the restartables was the program that printed from printer backup tape..." said Simon, for whom the significance of this fact would become horribly clear.
On the night in question, Simon had been assigned the task of dealing with the billing for the electricity utility. The billing program had done its stuff, as it always did, and Simon was diligently returning the tapes to storage when the MCP abruptly fell over and the Burroughs restarted.
Only four people were on shift, and it was all hands to the pumps to get everything running again. Simon noted that the printer had restarted and gave silent thanks for whatever colleague had saved him the task of dealing with it. Once complete, he trotted down to the mailroom with the stack of printed bills.
Neither Simon, nor those in the mailroom that did the mailing, spotted that around 2,500 bills had been printed twice.
The customers, however, did.
"A few days later some people called the newspaper to report receiving two bills for that month," he said. "You really don't want to end up on the front page of the newspaper."
"Meetings were held. Much shouting and wailing and gnashing of teeth," he recalled. "Fortunately, the big boss wanted to squeeze concessions out of Burroughs that week so the blame fell on them for lack of documentation and training."
For Simon, things took a more surreal turn. Having had to endure a dinner of fingerpointing from his parents (who were also on the receiving end of twin bills) he discovered that a few of his fellow citizens took a city hall cock-up a little too seriously:
"Some wackadoodles were less forgiving. We received a bomb threat in the data centre a few weeks later."
Ever screwed something up so comprehensively that you've found yourself on the end of potential physical as well as verbal abuse? Or forgotten the perils of an unplanned restart? We've been there. Send an email to [6]Who, Me? if you have too. ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burroughs-b6700-mainframe#TOC-Burroughs-B6700-emulator-project
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/15/algol_60_at_60/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3efV2wqEjEY&feature=emb_logo
[5] https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward/clearpath-forward-products/clearpath-mcp-software/clearpath-mcp-release-19
[6] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Computerized billing ...
> laughed, threw away one of the bills & paid the other. They were obviously duplicates
Only sensible course of action.
OTOH, idiots used to be idiots way before IT was invented.
Re: Computerized billing ...
The Reg could solicit its readers for stories for a new section:
"Impromptu tours of interesting facilities given to them as children because they just turned up" - especially tours in paces that these days wouldn't be allowed because of health and safety or data protection guidelines - or just because the foreman isnt given that sort of discretion.
My uncle and and his father once just turned up at a Cornish tin mine in the sixties, and were treated to a tour down the pit. My uncle afterwards used his pocket money to buy shares in it, which showed a good return during the rise in commodity prices a few years back.
I had to deal with a similar, but opposite problem one day for the UK Prison Service. They had an office in Birmingham that allowed the families of inmates to claim financial help for visiting their loved ones in chokey. The figures weren't immense, but they could claim travelling costs and occasional overnight B&B stays. The system ran on Novel Netware and was set up to print Girocheques in batches from a bespoke application.
One day I received a call saying that the system had gone haywire, printing duplicate cheques, many of which had already been sent out in the post. I had to drop everything and hire a car to drive like a madman from Liverpool to sort it out. I even got stopped for speeding on the M6, though the nice policemen let me off with a warning after breathylising me.
When I finally got in to the office, it took me an hour or so to track down the problem. To deal with a backlog of applications, the local management had instituted an "all hands to the pump" blitz, shoving through more than double the number of cases than they normally did. The then loaded up the girocheques (on continuous paper) into the impact printer and kicked off the print routine. There was so much data that it filled and overflowed the disk space allocated to the print queues by Novel and the print spooler crashed. Novel, in its wisdom, automatically restarted the spooler, which then restarted the print job, reprinting multiple chueques. Th two lowly admin assistants whose job it was to separate the cheques and stuff them into window envelopes happily continued doing their menial tasks, filling mailbags with duplicate Giros.
As can be imagined, many of the recipients thought that Christmas had come early and shot off down to the Post Office clutching handfulls of cheques. Much of this money was not recovered.
That reminds me..
Of the Graffiti files book I've got and the quote inside read thus:
"Double your pleasure, double your fun....
Xerox your paycheque"
On that note, things have moved on mightily these days as i paid my last cheque in by taking a picture with a phone. Strange times...
Re: That reminds me..
I haven't seen a cheque since circa 2002 when I lived in Italy. (Writing cheques for bills in a language you neither read nor write is a fun experience, let me tell you.) I moved to Norway in 2005 and even back then cheques were a distant memory to most Norwegians. I definitely don't miss that archaic method of transaction.
Re: That reminds me..
I have not written one in 10 years but occasionally do receive one (and not from some old aged relative). In my case, the Halifax deposit via photo saves me a great deal of time.
Re: That reminds me..
Not even a different language sometimes - I recall our lettings agent in Malaysia refusing a cheque because I'd written 'sixteen hundred' rather than 'one thousand six hundred' (English is perfectly acceptable in Malaysia for such things).
One good thing about cheques
The one thing I would miss if cheques became redundant is that it's the only elegant way to give a reasonable sum of money as a gift for, say, a wedding present or a birthday.
Sending someone a letter or a card with a cheque enclosed is a nice gesture. Sending someone a letter or a card with a note saying "I've transferred £xxx into your account" looks really naff. "I'd like to transfer some money to you - what are your account details?" is even worse.
Re: One good thing about cheques - @ Martin
"I'd like to transfer some money to you - what are your account details?" is even worse.
Unless it comes from a member of a royal family. Preferably Nigerian.
Re: That reminds me..
"Double your pleasure, double your fun....
Xerox your paycheque"
You do, of course, have to use the Xerox machine with the magnetic toner in.
IN similar circumstance, I suspect I would have been off to the bank/po asap as well
Glad we've moved on so much in the last 50 years
I mean you never see reports of gas bills for millions or inaccurate claim letters / duplicates being sent out.
What I can't fathom out is the extreme reaction. I mean it isn't as if they tried to claim it twice is it? What a fuss over nothing.
50 years ago ...
you could call the company in question, speak to a real, live human being who could probably deal with it.
Today: you probably can't find a 'phone number, if you do you wait for ages listening to crap music and end up speaking to some inane bot - or if you are really lucky someone in Mumbai who has not got a script to deal with your problem.
Progress :-(
Re: 50 years ago ...
[1]Verity Stob's State Transition Diagram for answering a phone
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2007/08/16/state_transition.gif
Computerized billing ...
Something similar happened in the late '60s or early '70s in Palo Alto. Most people laughed, threw away one of the bills & paid the other. They were obviously duplicates, probably the fault of that new fangled computer at City Hall, and so it was obvious that only one needed to be paid. My Dad was one of the few folks to call in and report it (or so they told him) ... mostly to offer his services, should they need help fixing the problem. They didn't, but he & I got a free tour of the new computer system out of it :-)