[GTALUG] IBM - cache skirmish story.

[Russell]

Actually this is more of a can't see the forrest for the trees issue. Or; when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail type thing, rather than one of Hughs war stories. 

I'm a corporate correctness kind of guy, so in my mind Wars are sanctioned. This was a pure and simple un-sanctioned tech skirmish.

I only ever did one hack on IBM owned equipment. It was while I was visiting at their Celistica site. The problem, which had been happening to my friend, who worked there and did some of the jobs she did remotely from home in the early 90's, was typematic delay. However IBM Staff told her it was the network lagging.  Both at home and at the office.

My friend was an internal event planner and would login to something, VAX/VMS I think. I never looked or asked. Her words not mine. 

I just checked the bios. After I booted to dos I noticed severe cache lag in typing. 

If you weren't a touch typist, you'd hardly notice the issue. I'm touch trained and so was my friend. I rebooted and went into the bios and increased the buffer from 4cps to 12cps. I am a fast typist, my friend was lightning fast. 

She dragged me up to Celstica the next day to do the same thing on her office computer.

For that hack and helping out with some tech stuff ie. setting up hw, which was being awarded to students at the Annual banquet, I got to see Celine Dion perform with Pebo Bryson and eat an outstanding meal, coordinated by the event group at the Inn on the Park

Also since the group got an award for their coordination of the banquet, I got to share in that award at Marche.

I'll always remember my friend saying nobody will ever believe that "my carpenter boyfriend fixed a computer issue that IBM techieboobies, could not."

So, I hope that the cache wiring diagrams have improved at IBM over the years, or this snippet of ledger news doesn't bode well at all.

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2018/04/blockchain-based-batavia-platform-set-to-rewire-global-trade-finance/

-- 
Russell