[Info-vax] The dangers of extended uptime. Was: Re: swap and page files

[Paul Sture]

In article <kc52iu$db5$1 at dont-email.me>,
 David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:

> Paul Sture wrote:
> 
> > When I first learned that NTFS stores file dates as UTC I could 
> > immediately see the disadvantages of VMS clusters across time zones.  
> 
> Ya know, nothing is ever perfect, and usually even worse at first.
> 
> When VMS was initially implemented, there were no clusters, and very 
> rudimentary networking.  It's been a long time, but I'm not sure that 
> ethernet was working in 1978.

Ethernet may have been on the drawing board in 1978, but according to 
Wiki it was only commercially available in 1980 and standardised as IEEE 
802.3 in 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

In that time frame I only used comms stuff over modems though, and even 
as late as 1997 I didn't have a NIC on any home system - something that 
allowed me to use a cheap backup solution incidentally, since the PC 
backup software I was using assumed that if a NIC was present you were 
running a server and had to pay a lot more.

> It's sort of hard to prepare for something that doesn't yet exist.  No 
> USB in 1978 either ....
> 
> No Y2K issues in 1978 either.  Not too many were worried about a 2 digit 
> year.

I started my IT career in 1977 and it was kind of assumed that you would 
need a rewrite to upgrade to the next box anyway.  Nobody back then 
seemed to think application solutions would last decades.
 
> Yeah, it would be a better approach to keep all dates and time in GMT, 
> and have local offsets.  Don't know how hard it would have been to 
> change VMS without breaking existing applications.  Not to mention 
> applications that already took care of multiple time zones in the 
> application code.
> 
> Thus the delimma of older software.  What to do when conditions change? 
>   Can changes be incorporated without breaking things?  Or do you just 
> say "bust everyone, this is the new way"?

I did do wholesales changes to code back in the 1970s and 1980s to 
embrace new features, but I was one of the few who dared do that.  It 
helps if you work in a smallish team.  Once you find yourself in a 
corporate environment with many departments, that becomes so much more 
difficult.

-- 
Paul Sture