FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

On Thu, 15 May 2003 11:57:58 +0800, "Varley, David (CBorn at Alcoa)"
<David.Varley AT alcoa.com.au> wrote:
> 
> My first job out of college was on control systems for secure
> laboratories containing potentially lethal pathogens. Motorola 6802
> based systems, programmed in assembler, and the assumption was that
> anything that could go wrong would. Bootstrapping was a nightmare, the
> CPU couldn't trust its own registers, let alone RAM or ROM on startup
> until it had tested them. And you would be surprised at the failures
> found, from CPUs where the Carry bit wasn't being set on some
> operations, to EPROMS that would fail in one location only following a
> specific instruction sequence. Those were the days:)))

Ah, the 6502.  My first indirect address (the Y register) 256 bytes at a
time.  

The day I get my MacArthur Grant, I'm going to start knocking on all the
door of people I know, and write down their best stories.  The book will
be called "War Stories".  My favorite one isn't funny anymore, thanks to
Osama.  It's about the VP of telecommunications at Bankers Trust, whose
downtown headquarters was suddenly cut off from the rest of the world one
day, circa 1982.  Much investigation, falling to backup lines, you can
imagine the chaos.  Meanwhile, of course, they worked on diagnosing what
was wrong with their line-of-site microwave link, the one that looked at
the Empire State Building (in midtown, perhaps 2 miles north).  Come to
find out, there was new building going up, called 7 World Trade Center,
but that wasn't exactly news: it had been going up for quite awhile.  What
was new?  That morning, they'd put the cladding on *just* the right floor,
turning their line 'o sight into a microwave-free zone.  How to Lose Your
Job to a Sheet of Granite, in One Easy Lesson.  

But that building is gone now, taking the fun out of the story.  

I think I found a good reference for your names.

http://btrcx1.cip.uni-bayreuth.de/cgi-bin/manpages/l10n_intro/5

most of which I think we have covered.  

Cheers, 

--jkl