Just to boast my old timer credentials.
There is an utility program in IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS, that has been there since the 60s.
It has just one assembly code instruction: a BR 14, which means basically ‘return’.
The first version was bugged and IBM had to issue a PTF (patch) to fix it.
The underlining linear algebra routines are written in… FORTRAN.
Pl/1 did it right:
Dcl 1 mybools, 3 bool1 bit(1) unaligned, 3 bool2 bit(1) unaligned, … 3 bool8 bit(1) unaligned;
All eight bools are in the same byte.
At this very moment, the tower my cellphone hooks to is not providing 5G connectivity. But when I went out to have breakfast and walked just one block I got a good one. So maybe some equipment was damaged by whatever happened (and has still not been repaired, which is understandable).
Good to know, and somehow good news.
There has been no space weather event remotely close to a Carrington one
What really scared me is the internet service and mobile networks went down a few minutes (like, 2-3 minutes) after the main power.
Comms switch centers and cell towers are supposed to have batteries to keep them running for a while. But they went black almost immediately.
During the day we got some short moments of connectivity. Short and sparse.
There are things that I’d like to have some explanation for.
You are right, of course. But the Spanish PM is called ‘President of the government’, and informally, ‘President’.
Banking IT engineer here.
In our case, everything ‘core’: checking and savings accounts, loans and credits, credit and debit cards… anything requiring a sub-second response time while being bombarded with tens of thousands of transactions per second AND requiring strict ACID transactions end to end AND 24x7 availability with quick recovery in case of disaster.
Secondary stuff is being moved to other architectures. And new core stuff is being written in Java… and ran on the mainframe.
Yeah, but we don’t try to apply our rules in their country. We demand they apply our rules in our jurisdiction.
They want to sell chlorinated chicken breasts in the US? No problem, but we don’t want that shit here.
It didn’t clear the return code. In mainframe jobs, successful executions are expected to return zero (in the machine R15 register).
So in this case fixing the bug required to add an instruction instead of removing one.