[Info-vax] Possible VMS jobs - City of New York Fire Dept

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <qp2h72$n0o$2 at pcls7.std.com>, moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) writes:
>Kerry Main <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>
>>Not sure of any hidden gotchas, but looks interesting. Posted Oct 25, 2019.
>
>
>>Extract:
>>The Fire Department, City of New York (FDNY), seeks a full-time CAD Analyst
>>in the Bureau of Technology Development and Systems. Reporting directly to
>>the Director of CAD & ECTP Development, the CAD Analyst shall perform
>>analysis of systems and processes to further the automation of fire and
>>medical dispatch functions; participate in the design of these tasks in
>>support of fire and medical dispatch requirements; produce the automation
>>tools resulting from the analysis and design and implement those tools. The
>>selected candidate shall lead the development, implementation, and
>>configuration of monitoring tools and capability for all Computer Aided
>>Dispatch systems and devices; coordinate with department and
>>extra-department monitoring bodies to ensure timely and accurate reporting
>>of all CAD-related events to network/system monitors and Doitt's
>>Monitor-of-monitors. Additionally, the candidate shall manage the CAD system
>>operating systems (OpenVMS), applying all relevant OS releases and patches.
>
>I worked there for a contractor about 7 years ago.  Oh the stories I could 
>tell.
>
>Caveat: I don't know what has changed over the last 7 years...
>
>This was the main dispatch system for the Fire Dept. of New York City. My job
>was initially to port the dispatch system from VAX to Itanium (skipping Alpha
>entirely), later was to improve/rewrite problematic code and implement
>policy changes into the code.
>
>Port VMS code from VAX to Itanium, just recompile and relink, right? HAHAHA,
>err, excuse me, but nope. This is homebrew code starting from the mid 1970s.
>Totally NYC-specific, not even close to being generic dispatch SW.
>It started on a PDP-11, Macro-11, and was later ported to VAX. Much of the
>PDP-11 assembler was converted by software into VAX assembler.  Over time
>many many people tinkered with it and by the time I saw it, it was a couple
>hundred thousand lines of Macro-32 with maybe 5-10% ported to C.  If you know
>(or were) someone who helped port VMS to Alpha years ago, the Macro-32 compiler
>is much pickier than the VAX assembler was, so we relived much of that.
>Plus so many "wheels" were re-invented, there was lots of code that did things
>that are in the VMS RTL or system services. Because they had to do things the 
>hard way on the PDPs.
>
>Much of what got run through the MACRO-32 assembler/compiler was much of the 
>semi-permanent DATA - things like the streets or equipment databases which got 
>updated once a week to once every couple months. The "real" databases got
>converted to a bunch of macro calls, a header (calling/defining the macros) and
>a trailer (a .END line) got tacked on, assembled, then $ LINK/SYSTEM=0/NOHEADER
>producing a binary file.
>
>OK, I'll stop now, I could babble for some time on this if allowed to...

I discussed this project with Purvis years ago.  Purvis should bave been hung,
shot, castrated, beaten about the head and then repeat for allowing such code 
to get into that state.

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.