SCO.com and Caldera.com dead

[Henry Spencer]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, James Knott wrote:
> ...Tube computers were also extremely unreliable (I used to 
> maintain & repair one in the Toronto Stock Exchange.) and not the kind 
> of thing you'd want to trust someone's life to.

How about 250 million lives? :-)  Tube computers could be made extremely
reliable, as witness the tube computers that controlled North America's
air defences for many years. 

As ENIAC showed, running the tubes at much less than their rated
electrical limits, and leaving the system on 24 hours a day so that the
tube filaments were never stressed by cooling down and heating up again,
made a huge difference.  The reliability still wasn't wonderful, with mean
times between failure measured in hours rather than days... but with
multiply-redundant systems and automatic switchover to a hot spare, a
failure of one computer didn't mean an interruption in service. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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