This takes me back...

Summer of 2000 I started working as an intern at a Fortune 500 w/ a series MF. Ostensibly, I was to be a dedicated (primarily) web developer for the DBA team (around 8 people excluding me). The primary RDBMS was DB2 on the MF, also IMS.

The first year, most of my time was spent doing VB Script in ASP and some occasional DB query tuning. My second year, .Net was new and I convinced my boss to migrate to ASP.net (I'd done a project in school with it, so I had a decent understanding of .Net for the time).

Anyways, a couple of highlights:

Pioneering use of BLOB storage in DB2 at the company (was a huge pain in the ass working with BLOBs from classic ASP).

I crashed the development LPAR (logical portion, sort of a VM in MF parlance) tuning a SQL query (hit a bug in the DB2 query optimized that somehow knocked out the entire OS). My green-screen term disconnect shortly after I tried to run my query. I got a call from the NOC along the lines of "whatever you did, dont do it again. You just took down the entire dev LPAR". Knocked about 10000 people off with a SQL query.

I spent an entire summer trying to get DB2 Connect (required software, at least at the time, to talk to the MF DB from either Windows or *nix), spent 8 hours a day most days of the week on calls with IBM support trying to get it to work on a windows server cluster. Followed their documented instructions to the letter. Never got it to work. After the summer ended, they came back with: "this is an unsupported configuration", despite clear documentation on how to set it up in their printed manuals.

Had a bug against DB2 where the "select" columns could cause different number of records to be returned. It was a difference between using a coalesce vs "case when null". We happened to have a 3rd party DB tuning expert on site teaching a class at the time. When I showed the 2 theoretically queries she was stumped. IBM got a copied of our non-sensitive DB to replicate the results. Never did hear about a resolution on that.

Apparently about a month or so before I started, they had just retired the last punch card reader. The extra unused punched made for great notecards.

Finally, one of my favorites was when I attended a series of meetings at the datacenter. The DC was over 100 miles away from the office, because apparently it got the company a huge cost savings in disaster insurance. The building was basically a bunker in the northern Midwest. 1 window in the entire building, a little more than a foot square. For the security guard. It was also inch thick bullet proof glass. No heaters, but around 2 dozen or so industrial air conditioners, each the size of about 2 residential refrigerators.

So, along with getting rid of the punch card reader, they had recently upgraded to a tape silo, instead of having human runners get a tape and load it, when requested. The new tape silo also had incredibly higher storage density. So, all the old tapes were gone, nearly every was in the silo. Thus, the old tape room adjacent to the server was no longer needed for tapes, and the room was turned into a meeting room. The tape shelves were removed, and conference tables and chairs were added. Nothing else change. Including the automated door shutting and HALON activating in case of a fire. IIRC, they warned us that you had about 15 seconds from the time the fire alarm sounded to evacuate that room before the door forcibly closed and the HALON activated and near certainly killing you.

I always went for the chair closest to the door.