29 Oct
2004
29 Oct
'04
7:01 a.m.
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, William Donzelli wrote:
Oh neither David nor I take it that way; "downtime" likely has
systemic implications. Peripheral equipment, problems (hardware
or otherwise) with newfangled tape drives, who knows.
More, it was a comment on user perception of reliability,
and an obvious and gratuitous jab at M$ :-)
I was reading
that 1961 BRL survey, and found the user reports
of the IBM 701 fascinating. They apparently had an average
uptime of about 2-4 hours. That doesn't seem like much by
today's standards, but then how often does Windows crash on you?
One of the often told stories of the early days of computers is that of
the completely unreasonable downtime, due to tube failure. There is even a
myth (pretty much disproved) about AN/FSQ-7 SAGE techs wearing roller
skates to replace the constantly dying tubes.
Basically, tube computers were not that bad, all of the time. o