When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere
- Reference: 1638174612
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/11/29/who_me/
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Today's confession comes from a reader we'll call "George" (not his name) and takes us back once more to the UK of the 1980s and his time working at a pathology company.
"They were switching from a proprietary ICL system to a new Unix-based solution which was still in the 'being developed' phase," he said.
[2]
The 1980s were the period when ICL (International Computers Limited) was getting increasingly cuddly with Fujitsu - [3]which would result in a takeover in the '00s. ICL was still a big noise in the UK mainframe world back then.
[4]
[5]
For the history buffs, ICL also had roots in Elliott Automation and the English Electric Computers company, itself notable for the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) computer, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary this week.
Back to George. "Due to some government requirements, they needed a quick solution to process a new type of pathology report," he said.
[6]
It was that old chestnut: it only needed to work for a few weeks. Just until the whizzbang Unix system was up and running, replete with flashing lights, whirring noises, and reports aplenty.
Fine. George found an ageing Xenix box, unleashed his C skills and put together a rag-tag mash-up of shell scripts to get things working. It "provided a form entry/lookup/print system that met the immediate need," he told us. Just for a few weeks, mind. Until the new system was in place.
He thought no more about it and, as is so often the case in our industry, moved on to another job. And then another one. The Xenix box was long forgotten.
[7]
Five years went by before the inevitable call came through. "My 'lousy software' had stopped working," said George.
At least that was how the person on the other end of the line described it. At first he had no idea what the caller was complaining about before dusty recollections shuffled forward.
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After a jaunt down memory lane, "it turned out that the system was fine and the stop-gap forms were still working," he told us. Impressive stuff and a testament to his skills that it had kept ticking over all that time. However, he'd forgotten one thing: "The disk had filled up and it couldn't save any more files."
Hence the complaint. Sure, the "lousy software" had performed its task admirably for years, but no more disk space meant no more reports.
George whipped out that favourite of command link jockeys, rm to clear down some of those years old files and dropped in a cron script to repeat the process every few months.
"The system was as good as new," he recalled. "I still wonder if it is still being used..."
We can't all write code that continues to run unattended on decades-old NASA and ESA probes, but a good few of us probably have left temporary fixes in dark corners of the data centres that lingered way past their use-by dates.
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YaSy63mar095f2YOpoo3iQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/21/icl_brand_put/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YaSy63mar095f2YOpoo3iQAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2011/11/28/charles_simonyi_on_word_excel_films/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2013/05/20/contractors_guide/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/01/who_me/
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At Grace, re: temp solutions...
There is nothing so permanent as a temporary fix that works. The heat death of the universe will be populated with cockroaches, Twinkies, & all those "temporary" fixes that just kept going.
*Hands you a pint & clinks rims*
As someone whom couldn't code his way out of a wet tissue, I am in awe over those whom can not only do so, but can write such code that Just Keeps Going. Cheers!
Re: At Grace, re: temp solutions...
Twinkies will still be around because even Cockroaches wont eat them.
Re: At Grace, re: temp solutions...
Damn right there, even us cockroaches have standards
Meanwhile back in engineering , theres lots and lots of very old code thats never updated because.... it works, and besides it costs way too much to update it....
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The secret to a long life
> "I still wonder if it is still being used..."
Many years ago the company that paid me to sit at a desk bought a proprietary system from an american company. It ran (IIRC) Solaris 2.6 and was the epitome of a "black box" solution. Data went in and something useful came out.
The machine was locked up tight. Nobody in the company had access to it. No-one knew the root password. It never received any software updates whatsoever and it kept running.
It seems to me that provided the o/s and the apps are stable and that adequate security is implemented, there is never any need to perform updates - or introduce new bugs as the skeptic might describe the process.
Is it still running today? Doubtful, since external environments change and boxen that do not change with them become obsolete. However that little box was the "perfect" computer. it never needed maintenance. it never crashed. It just quietly got on with its job.
I suspect that if it had been allowed to, it would continue running indefinitely. Much like that Linux box that gets stuck on boot-up with "a start job is running ... no limit" report on the (text) console. That is, if the user knows how to get to the text console.
Re: The secret to a long life
I keep my Vet's blood machine running. It's an original [1]Idexx Vettest 8008 , and is about 30 years old. It's up-to-date, though ... it runs a 22ish year old version of FreeDOS, because MS-DOS is no longer supported. None of the Vets or vet-techs who have run a blood panel on the thing know (or care) that it runs DOS, much less that it's built on a rather elderly PC. It's a single-purpose device, and air-gapped, so security isn't an issue.
I know of about forty of these things still in use here in the SF Bay Area, because I have worked on them. I suspect there are several hundred more. (I bought a bunch of used units 23ish years ago from Vets with Y2K worries ... I was speculating on the need for spares in the future. It was a good guess on my part. I have since augmented my stock by purchasing them whenever I run across 'em.)
[1] https://www.idexx.com/en/veterinary/analyzers/vettest-analyzer/
At Jake...
And now for your next trick, install Windows 11 on them & make them play Crysis.
*Laughs as my head explodes in sarcastic glee*
Re: At Jake...
Difficult. It boots and runs from a single floppy, contains no HDD, and the display is a rather small LCD. Most early units are 286 based, with 640K RAM. Later models have a 386, 2 megs of RAM and an unused IDE controller and unused ISA expansion slot. They all have odd memory mapping because of the LCD display, a small built-in thermal printer, and proprietary hardware for the blood work itself. I have never tried to plug in a HDD or expansion card, no point.
Temporary hacks aren't.
If you are reading this, you're probably using the hack that I put together in 4.1BSD (now called 4.1aBSD) for part of the TCP/IP stack to be included in 4.2BSD[0]. It was supposed to be one of those "Just get us through the demo, dammit!" hacks. I got 'er done over Christmas/NewYears break in 1981. Virtually every version of TCP/IP since has used it. Not too bad for a quick hack ...
[0] Just to cut the usual pack of idiots putting words into my mouth off at the socks, no, I didn't write the whole stack. That's why I said "part of". It is only about 120 lines of C in total.
Talking of things long forgotten, chugging away in a corner...
...years ago I was at one of my favourite sites - I genuinely enjoyed working there even if it could be difficult sometimes.
Anyway, a new rack in their server room had gone in, replete with a new (from memory) 4.5kVA UPS. Alas, said UPS turned out to be faulty so when the electrician wired his 40A commando plug in and turned on the power, the whole building electrics tripped.
Irritating but not the end of the world (we did it twice just to be sure it was the UPS).
Everything that had gone down, did come back up and all was fine. Or so we thought.
Suddenly, no voicemail. At all. Not even an option.
Queue much hilarity (and panic) as no one seemed to know what drove said voicemail systems.
Purely by chance, one of the postroom chaps overheard us saying something like "there must be a server somewhere for this thing!" and asked us if by server we meant a big computer? Because if we did, he knew where such a beast might be hiding.
He took us into the post room and in one corner, literally buried under a 4 foot high stack of hessian postal sacks was an ancient Compaq server. Upon restarting it, it loaded Netware 3.1 and sat waiting for a login.
Queue more hilarity when they called the company being paid to support it to be met with "You're who? It's a what? Running what?"
They did eventually track down the login details and we were able to reload the voicemail software, but I believe there were some rather pointed conversations to be had with the support company.
Hats off to that Compaq as well - no airflow, no effective cooling whatsoever and it just ran and ran and ran completely forgotten about.
Re: Talking of things long forgotten, chugging away in a corner...
Seems to be a theme of Netware boxes running happily in odd places without any issues: [1]https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
Re: Talking of things long forgotten, chugging away in a corner...
I had a similar experience with on old Compaq 286 server.
This one had actually been put into a cupboard and forgotten about, still powered on, still running a single simple process and the up-time must have been in years as no-one knew it was there.
We rediscovered it when we had to change the IPX routing across all our, several hundred, servers to a new protocol (I cant remember the details). Unfortunately the default protocol was the old version so all our network traffic routed through this aging 286 machine until we found it and switched it off. We had tracked it down to a LAN segment, knew what device type it was, but then had to literally swarm into some offices checking under desks and on top of cabinets until one the the team found a couple of cable disappearing into the side of a cupboard. We turned off the machine for a couple of days and there were no complaints so it was then decommissioned.
Cron script
... whipped out that favourite of command link jockeys, rm ...
Ungrateful DHs.
I hope he left with a nice check in his pocket.
I would have dropped in a cron script that would run every six months.
It would print out a service requirement with instructions to call me to fix my lousy software.
And charge accordingly for the visit each time.
And if not called, stop the bloody thing in its tracks within a week.
Lousy software indeed ...
O.
Tempted to dig out my Xenix floppies.
But there's an archive out there! Mind you mine would run on a 286!
I read that as a pathological company, maybe more common back then.
Stop Gap
Ah, the good old stop gap solution that ended up as a "business critical" permanent solution.
They're going to have to do something about it in the next decade or so. I doubt Xenix will be Y2038 compliant.
Most versions of Xenix weren't Y2K compliant.
Back in 2010, I replaced a manual invoice production system at Rolls Royce which took 2 man weeks every month to perform with Excel macros that took 10 minutes every month. This was a temporary system while they evaluated packages.
As far as I know, it's still running.
Alan
Misquote
It's meant to be not letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
"Best" is a (possibly subjective) attainable goal and of no relevance to that quote.
Perfect, however is seldom attainable and trying usually f**s up getting anything useful done.
Re: Misquote
Erm at our company the prevalent attitude is: "The barely adaequate (for now) is the enemy of the good".
The stop gap that I wrote in 1992 to cover things for "six months, nine tops" while the real system was developed is still in place.