Posts by Bluebottle

Normally it wouldn't have been too much of an issue for me, as internet is with another provider, but a couple of hours into the outage internet went down too - a local power outage that was fixed 9 hours later. So no mobile phone; no VOIP as internet's down. Coffee shop (run by a mad French ex-gendarme) was taking cash as usual and had their bank account details shown for direct credits so that was OK.

Reminds me of when I worked for an ambulance service, and we stipulated that all infrastructure must be in-house. It all crashed when the Health core router died even though none of our traffic was supposed to go through it, so paper and pen for emergency 000 calls.

I remember those discs - top half removable, bottom half fixed. You had to screw the top half down onto the bottom half, making sure the locating pin on one half matched the hole on the other half, otherwise a nice head crash eventuated.

I think our system was a Singer System Ten at that time.

Of course here in Oz it's Vegemite. Don't remember what Marmite tastes like but apparently, Vegemite is super-charged Marmite.

In the early 70s we had a Singer System 10 with split disks (model 41 & 42 ??). The top half (2 platters) unscrewed and could be replaced by a different top half, making it easy to move data around. The bottom half was also 2 platters. The top cover looked like a normal cake cover, but the top disk had a small pin that engaged with a small hole on the bottom disk.

When screwing a top half onto a bottom half, it was quite easy to misalign the pin and hole, resulting in a lop-sided set of platters which the heads didn't like at all.

20+ years ago I was primary support for the state's ambulance dispatch system - 000/999/911 calls come in and are sent to the ambulance dispatcher to send a resource. For some reason we were doing an upgrade in the early morning (less emergency calls in case something goes wrong) and as a precaution my off-sider was on-site as well. It was a home-grown Pick system running on Pr1me minis with a 3GL green screen front end. The upgrade went fine, but while I was looking around the system I saw a file that I thought wasn't needed so I deleted it. Immediate chaos - everything stopped. Mad scramble for paper and pencil so emergency calls could be recorded and ambulances dispatched. Fortunately we had a live backup system so after a few minutes of panic, we copied the missing file from the backup system and restarted and everything's back to normal.

Always got by off-sider to look over my shoulder after that and he didn't like playing with the system.