[ale] Engineering Archaeology

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:39:40 -0500
Jeff Lightner via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> One company I worked for initially installed Datapoint systems at
> client sites.   Those used the old 5 MB  spinning disk packs.   We
> would train the night shift to do a nightly backup.
> 
> If a site went down and we couldn’t get current data going again we’d
> have to tell them to put in the previous night’s backup so we could
> restore it.   Usually that meant loss of up to 24 hours of data
> they’d have to reinput manually.
> 
> One site on being told to insert the previous night’s backup put the
> phone down to “discuss” the request.   After some whispering they

I did programming and support for a medical management package in the
mid 1980's. PDP-11, TSX riding on RT-11, 10 MB drives that looked like
a cake tin with a handle on top, 9 track tapes.

One customer was a four doctor practice that took in thousands per day.
One day their computer manager (let's call her Jenny) called me up,
saying that she accidentally kicked the power plug out of the wall and
initted the system disk. The disk was now unbootable. 

"No problem Jenny," I said. "Just restore from your latest backup."

"I can't." said Jenny. When I asked why she said that the backup tape
got destroyed too, because she was doing a backup when she kicked the
plug out of the wall.

"No problem," I said. "Just use your next oldest backup tape."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I don't have another backup tape. The doctors would only buy one
backup tape, and that's the one that got destroyed."

Back then blank 9 track tapes cost $15.00 apiece. Thousands of dollars
went were taken in by that practice every day, and they were too cheap
to buy more than one backup tape.

Our head programmer had an IQ slightly over 250: He went there, booted
an OS installer tape, and somehow managed to fix up the hard disk. I
told Jenny she'd gotten lucky this time and she'd better demand those
doctors buy multiple backup tapes.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques