Tony Wachs TW stories wanted 1284

And *this* reminds me of a couple of tape stories from my own misspent youth:

We had a product that ran on MVS (in batch mode, with an ISPF-TSO administrative UI) and CICS (MVS and VSE), among other platforms. For the mainframe, we shipped product to customers on good old 9-track tape reels. We were a small company and money was always tight.

One day we found out that Northeastern University's College of Computer Science was getting rid of a roomful of old 9-track backup tapes. So the company CEO, who had a connection with the CCS lab staff, drove from Framingham to Boston and loaded up the trunk of the car with tapes - a motley collection of reels of various sizes and ages, containing all sorts of data that probably should not have left the school intact, like student accounts, faculty research, and who knows what-all.

We carted them up to our offices and stacked them in a back room, and when we got an order, we'd find a tape that was big enough, clean any old labels off the reel with solvent, stick one of ours on, copy the distribution tape contents on to it, and ship it off.

Customers were paying tens of thousands of dollars for software, and we'd ship it to them on some crummy used tape. Wasn't always readable when it arrived, either.

That was when things went correctly. One day, when most of the mainframe developers were out of town on a customer visit, we got a rush order in for mainframe product. These were generally handled by our office manager. He found a tape of the right length, cleaned it up, and then went looking for the product distribution source tape - and couldn't find it. One of the other guys dug around for a while and came up with something he thought was right.

We didn't duplicate the tapes ourselves; we were sharing a building with a service bureau, and they made the copies for us. So the office manager brought the "distribution" tape and the target tape down to be copied.

The sysop calls us back in a bit: the distribution won't fit on the tape. This raises a flag for the office manager, who's sure he has the right length target tape, but the guy who came up with the supposed master is convinced *he's* right, so we give the bureau a longer tape, get the copy made, and send it off.

Customer calls us the next day to tell us we sent them the entire source code for the product.

They were kind enough to destroy it - once they got a good product tape.

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Ten or ten thousand, does it much signify, Helen, how we date fantasmal events, London or Troy? -- Basil Bunting