The very first text editor 3697

actually had a business person reporting oriented application happen in the early 90s on unix. shell script that did some stuff, piped it to sort which then piped it to some other stuff.

in business production, batch environment all sorts of things get reported, excepted, and even automagic features developed for handling wide range of exceptions, etc ... somewhat evolving over 50 years with the buttumption that the person responsible for the application is not present (there may or may not be people present when the application actually ran ... but there definitly was an orientation that the responsible individuals weren't present and therefor it was necessary to evolve the infrastructure for supporting paradigm w-o the responsible people around).

in contrast, most of the infrastructures that have evolved from interactive platform have tended to make buttumptions about responsible people are present and can take whatever corrective actions that are necessary. such infrastructures can be more "user friendly" for some things ... but can be enormously difficult to adapt to a automated "lights out" operation (like huge web farms).

so, in this particular example, it turned out that (for whatever reason) sort exhausted the available file space ... but there was no exception for it and-or anything to catch the exception even if there had been an exception ... and the process continued happily on ... but with only about 20 percent of the people ... including eventually replacing the original file.

then of course when we were doing ha-cmp

we found ourselves talking to some places with 5-nines (aggregate system .99999) availability requirements (five minute total outage per year).

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