From: kendall@iat.holonet.net (Kendall Willets)
Subject: Re: Did microsoft really write an OS/2 "Terminator" crash prog?
Organization: HoloNet National Internet Access BBS: 510-704-1058/modem
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 11:04:47 GMT

jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard) writes:
: In article <C02CEz.HqE@iat.holonet.net> kendall@iat.holonet.net (Kendall Willets) writes:
: >BTW, this project was at the U.S. Postal Service - try not to think about
: >it if you buy stamps...  
: 
: Is this those cute little dedicated Unisys countertop systems they use with
: the dedicated keyboard and scale, and two screens so the customer can see
: what's going on too? I always thought those were neat, and figured they were
: PC-technology based... I didn't know they had been OS/2 based, though.
: 
: -- 
: Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
: jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu      | adequately be explained by stupidity.
:  "Brought to you by the letters O, S, and by the number 2." -- Mike Levis

'Fraid not.  This was a system to monitor the thousands of people who
currently work millions of dollars worth of overtime without management
having a clue.  It was a fairly sophisticated idea, to take input from
people's timecard transactions (currently processed in batches) and feed a
realtime picture of who's doing what where.  We got OS/2 1.3 to handle the
transaction processing fairly well - running Oracle and our program in 16
MB (quite a hassle, but reliable once it was running).

The problem was that the Post Office is almost entirely made up of people
who couldn't get hired anywhere else - DOS fanatics who insist on writing
everything in assembly code, managers who don't know the difference
between unix and Windoze.  We (consultants) were doing so well with OS/2
(they hated that) and Oracle (they insisted B-trieve would just blow it
away) and SQL-Windows ( they quintupled the programming staff because they
could do it better without development tools) that they just had to find a
chink in our armor.  They eventually pointed to the fact that our
alpha-level system was crashing "all the time" - about once every two
weeks, running 24 hours.  Naturally, DOS would save the day, since they
were such wizards and they wouldn't be burdened by incomprehensible system
API's - they could just write all of the functions they needed! 

I was amazed at how little protest this idea got.  There were problems
with os/2 1.3's memory limit, but I estimated we could convert to unix
in only slightly more time than the DOS mutation would require, and a lot
of people agreed with me.  However one of the senior analysts kept saying
things like "I don't see why DOS would be so different" and trying to make
 it seem like we were the ones who were stuck on ideology.  Eventually she
just blasted me in a bout of self-righteousness and I cleaned out my desk.

It was early this spring that I heard she had had a child by the head DOS
programmer, about ten years her junior.  They got married, but he spends
most of his time on the road, trying to keep four sites running, out of
the dozens or perhaps hundreds in which we were originally supposed to
install.  I guess crash protection wasn't the only kind of protection they
forgot about..