Why Government Computers Are Such a Mess: Hercules Has Nothing On Musk's Wizards

PJ Media ^ | February 12, 2025 | Charlie Martin

[GingisK]

Another of those female giants was Dr. Donnamai White, who is still alive last time I checked. She worked for Advanced Micro Devices in the department that designed the AM2901 Bit Slice integrated circuit family. She wrote the user manuals and the training regimen. The PDP-11 team learned the ropes under her tutelage.

I've exchanged email with her. She is a happy lady, currently engaged in writing stories for children.

Computing is a fun world just chuck full of wonderful and talented people.

[Myrddin]

Now there is a good time, especially when they are printed on a 12” stack of paper.

Lots of fun. We had a distressing case where the mainframe was crashing right around 5 PM. I dug into a big dump and identified the last terminal that did an input before the crash. A couple people were sent to guard the terminal and sure enough a person arrives just before 5 PM and begins entering a transaction. The "guards" asked what she was doing and she replied, "I waited until the end of the day because every time I do this transaction, the system goes down". Bingo. She was asked to enter the transaction, but not to transmit it. A screen dump was written to a printer and the terminal was cleared. Don't do the transaction again. The screen dump was sent to Bellcore where it was determined that the transaction tickled a bug in a UNISYS 1100 common bank library. The bug corrupted the common bank and caused the mainframe to crash. The bug was fixed and a new library distributed. The transaction completed correctly after the patch.

My boss added a note that a user should not be able to bring the system (mainframe) down. Sometimes it just works out that way.

[Myrddin]

Anyone remember that joke and where it started?

I'll have to take a pass on this one.

[mairdie]

Jean had been president of ACM. Another president was Fran Allen, whom I worked with at IBM Research, and for whom my husband once worked. I talked the head of research into getting me out of language design and into video production and I made a documentary for Fran on an eccentric genius, John Cocke. For her shoot, I brought in a steadicam operator but it turned out that Fran was in pretty bad shape because her brother was dying that day. I was ready to can the shoot but she wanted to take her mind off of it, so we went ahead. Besides being a 20 take talent, Fran was having trouble with her lines. That’s how I learned why an actor selling cars in a commercial was panting so much. But while she was pacing in front of the lab windows, I motioned to the cameraman to film her. Then, when I put the opening together, I grabbed pieces of her sentences and glued them together under her “thinking” at the window. And she ended up looking BRILLIANT!

Computer History - John Cocke: A Retrospective by Friends - 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYwd30iWVvw

I’ve also got funny stories about John Backus, who invented FORTRAN and Backus-Naur Form. I crawled around on the floor during his group meeting and shot up into faces.

John Backus Group Meeting - IBM Research - 5 July 1989
https://youtu.be/KzBkb-bvNK4

[mowowie]

That was all before my time.
I was hired in 1994 we were doing Win NT installs.
you guys were amazing though saw LOTS of Experience retire over the years with nobody to replace them.
I spent a lot of time just doing service calls.
IRS, SSI, Banks, DMV’s, prisons, cop stations, secret service, etc, etc..
Thats where i saw most of the Gov obsolescence.
A LOT of dot-com bubble companies..
It was pretty interesting work going to all of those places every day.
i kinda miss it now..

[Myrddin]

I taught an embedded systems course at Southwestern College from 1980 to 1983. Many of my students entered my PacBell data center between 1983 and 1991. They had been hired by DEC or IBM. The building had IBM, DEC, Amdahl, UNISYS and Tandem systems. I had a Pyramid system on the floor for competition to run a new support system. The part time CE made a simple, fatal error in backing the root filesystem to tape. He reversed the order of arguments to the "dd" command and wrote garbage from the tape all over the root filesystem. Ouch. It was a sad development because the Pyramid box was performing well in head to head competition with the other company.

[GingisK]

You obviously had a blast. Well done!

Computers were a lot more fun in those days.

[GingisK]

You only have 5 years on me. You’re still viable. ;-D

[ABN 505]

Just went through all the reply's on this thread and I am convinced we have the smartest, and best informed people on the web. Mairdie you should apply for a job with the DOGE Boy's you could be the Head Genius.

[mairdie]

I’m nothing compared to the experts that fill these threads. I’m part of history, not the present. But I absolutely agree with you that the Freepers are some of the best minds out there and bring great analysis capabilities to confusing discussions.