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From: socha@drivax.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,comp.misc
Subject: Re: What the world needs now
Message-ID: <1827@drivax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Jun-87 14:59:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: drivax.1827
Posted: Thu Jun 11 14:59:22 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jun-87 23:47:43 EDT
References: <1240@ssc-vax.UUCP> <631@mapper.UUCP> <3268@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Reply-To: socha@drivax.UUCP (Henri J. Socha (x6251))
Followup-To: talk.bizarre
Organization: Digital Research, Monterey
Lines: 27
Keywords: It's so simple to program a computer to explode
Xref: utgpu talk.bizarre:2031 comp.misc:620
Summary: APL in the big apple


The following story was related to me by employees of
I.P. Sharp Associates (IPS).  They, with
Scientific Time Sharing Corp. (STSC) wrote APL for IBM back in the early days.


It seems that there started to be competitors to IPS/STSC's APL system.
These companies would usually use IBMs APL (written by IPS/STSC)
on their large IBM mainframes.  Sometimes they would add extra
bulletproofing so that APL would not bomb, get better performance, etc.

Now, IPS/STSC really knew APL (and the IBM implementation) very well.
In fact, an employee living in Palo Alto would debug/enhance the
production on-line APL system from his home!
There were people across North America and in Europe (at that time) using
this single mainframe (360/158 I think).  The computer was in Toronto Canada.

Anyway, a competitor named Manhattan APL (I think) called up IPS and said
they were about to come online and if IPS wanted to, they could test
the system.  Manhattan said they had filled in all the holes and the system
was unbreakable.

Manhattan APL came online for their customers about 2 months late.
It seems that some of their disk drives had thrashed themselves to death.
-- 
UUCP:...!amdahl!drivax!socha                                      WAT Iron'75
"Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler."  A. Einstein