William Pechter: VMS source fiche was very common of sites owned by large corporations. Their IT staff used it to research bugs... and as sample code for writing their own drivers etc... ===== Indeed, I used the VMS source microfiche to learn how to handle various sorts of errors (machine checks, memory errors) better in UNIX. Stock VAX systems at the time just crashed on any error, but it turned out that many of them admitted recovery: some errors were transient, others could be ridden over by disabling some piece of the hardware. This led to an amusing event on the VAX-11/750 that at the time handled e-mail as uucp node research!. (Its internal name on our datakit node was grigg.) People noticed that the system was running slowly. I checked and discovered that the CPU itself seemed to be a bit slower. Then I checked logs and discovered that a week earlier, there had been a cache error; my new recovery code had turned off the failing half of the cache, logged the error, and forged ahead. o At the next convenient time, we took the system down and ran DEC's standalone diagnostics. (Contrary to the rude stories one hears, those diags were in fact pretty thorough.) The problem didn't show up, so we booted grigg back up again, secure in the knowledge that if the problem was persistent, my code would let us know without crashing. (I don't think it ever showed up again.) We also learned to pay more attention to console messages! Norman Wilson Toronto ON

(Contrary to the rude stories one hears, those diags were in fact pretty thorough.)