February 16, 1989
Dear Everyone:
They moved us last night. When I left work yesterday, I was on PHVMB. When I came in this morning I was on CPVMC. Not to worry, we were expecting it. In fact, we were overjoyed because the last we’d heard they weren’t going to even THINK about moving us until some time in March. Then last week, they said, “Get ready, we’re moving you next Tuesday.” Which they changed to Wednesday, but that’s OK.
Allow me to explain.
Remember CRMIS, the Company Records Management Information Screw-up? Back in January, CRMIS went Worldwide (heaven help the world). Suddenly things that used to work fine started going haywire. Other things just plain didn’t work at all. Much gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair and calls and computer notes to CITC.
CITC stands for Company Information Technology Company. Some companies have a systems analyst. Others have a whole Computer Services Department. The Company, which is larger than some developing nations, has an entire company devoted to running all the computers for all of the operating companies. They are the “they” that moved us last night.
After looking into, over and under the problems, CITC came to the realization that there was nothing wrong with CRMIS (not true actually, but for all intents and purposes as it relates to this immediate problem). It was the host that was causing all the fuss.
You see, IBM created a system which they called Virtual Machine. VM lets many users log onto a host from terminals on a timeshare basis. Sort of like thousands of people staying in the same condo on Maui on the same weekend. Nobody bumps into anyone because the computer keeps everyone separate in its memory. So far, so good. You only get charged for the time that the computer actually spends doing what you tell it to do.
For example, this letter is on VM. I type out a screen full of whatever and hit enter to add the screen to my file. The computer pays no attention to what I’m doing until I hit the enter key. Then it swallows what I’ve typed and adds it to the file. In the meantime, hundreds of other people can be doing the same thing. When you hit enter, you go into a holding pattern until the computer, which is constantly checking all of the logged on users, sees that you’ve hit enter and swallows what you gave it.
Everybody still with me? Good. This computer, by the way, is in “Hobby”. My stuff goes to smaller computer which used to be in “Pleasant Hill”. That computer routes what I’ve entered to the big computer in “Hobby”. This is why my host was called PHVMB. PH meaning “Pleasant Hill”; VM meaning Virtual Machine; and B meaning this was the second host on the “Pleasant Hill” system. (Actually, the “Pleasant Hill” computer was moved to the Company Park last year; but they didn’t want to confuse people, so they kept on calling it PHVMB even if it didn’t go through “Pleasant Hill” anymore.)
Each host has a number of users that can log onto it. When the number of people on the system at one time gets up to 65% of the computer’s capacity, it’s time to spin off another host and move some of the people over. This is why you have hosts A, B, C, etc. and you route them through different small computers like the “Pleasant Hill” computer and the Company Park computer.
Here’s where we ran into some trouble. It seems that marketing, which uses the same host that we did, PHVMB, added some 300 people in January. We went from less than 65% of host capacity to over 100%. The poor computer was spending all of its time just trying to keep track of all the users. As soon as you hit that enter key, you went into Computer Limbo. Long-term holding pattern. And, mind you, we’re talking about one of those Cray Super-computers that thinks in fractions of a millisecond, and takes up a whole building by itself.
This was a major oops on the part of CITC, since they never should have let that many users on one host. Apparently the left hand never let the right hand know which end was up. And they were much too busy doing some other major moves of large groups to take time to fix us up. From what we heard, Marketing was doing some real screaming, too, and they got the same message as we did: “Wait until March.”
Now, all of a sudden, we’re on another host. Sounds like somebody up high enough got embarrassed at the snafu and told somebody, “I don’t care how much it costs or how long YOU have to work overtime, YOU’re going to get my tail out of this sling right away.”
What this really means is that we no longer have such a nifty reason for why we can’t get our work done.
IBM also developed a system called PROFS. This stands for PRofessional Office System. It includes a handy item called PROOFREAD. When I’ve finished my letter each week, I run it through PROOFREAD. It reads the document (letter) and then prints it on the screen, highlighting any words that it thinks I’ve mis-spelled. It recognizes “Byron” and “Richard” and thinks that all of the rest of us can’t spell our names correctly.
It also doesn’t recognize Company with a capital C.
Aren’t computers wonderful?
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. I LOVE my new desk! Paying bills is a pleasure with everything right where you need it. But I have to admit something: I got the desk on Saturday and it wasn’t until the following Friday that I noticed that there seemed to be something wrong with one of the drawer pulls on one of the file drawers. It didn’t look like the others. It hung sort of differently.
I got down on the floor to get a better look; and I finally realized what it was. This one was fastened onto the drawer right side up.
All the others were upside down. That’s why it didn’t look the same.
Since it took me nearly a week to catch on to this, I can see where "Jeannie" could have the desk for three years and not notice it. Drawer pulls are not high on her priority list.
P.
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