Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!elroy!devvax!jplpro!leem
From: leem@jplpro.JPL.NASA.GOV (Lee Mellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: H/W vs. S/W
Message-ID: <1733@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 1 Apr 88 17:03:11 GMT
References: <2586@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU> <1396@ur-tut.UUCP> <3867@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <363@ncifcrf.ncifcrf.gov>
Sender: news@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
Reply-To: leem@jplpro.JPL.NASA.GOV (Lee Mellinger)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena CA.
Lines: 34

In article <363@ncifcrf.ncifcrf.gov> palmer@ncifcrf.gov (Thomas Palmer) writes:
:In article <3867@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr) writes:
:> 
:Fred Brooks tells an interesting story during lectures in his
:software engineering course.  The story involves a single-user mid-sixties
:machine during the hardware testing stages.  Software developers were
:given very limited access time to the machine.  They prepared for these
:sessions *very* carefully.  They had all their test data ready; were
:prepared for various outcomes, and could rapidly arrive at hypotheses
:as to what went wrong.  They had a PLAN.
:
:I didn't mention that those early software developers had to contend
:with possible hardware bugs too.  Can you imagine?
:
:
: Thomas C. Palmer	NCI Supercomputer Facility

I don't have to imagine, I spent many an hour in the wee hours of the 
morning trying figure out why the machine wasn't doing what I wanted
it to, if it was doing anything at all, all the while never sure if
my programs were wrong, or the hardware documents that were used to 
write from were correct, or the hardware was broken (that occurred
quite often on the prototypes and engineering models) or the hardware
logic had a design flaw (that occurred all to often).

Lee

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|Lee F. Mellinger                         Jet Propulsion Laboratory - NASA|
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