For those times when being On Call means more than just cycling the power
On Call Sometimes some systems just have to work, and there is always a Register reader to save the day. Welcome to On Call. Our story today takes us back to the 1990s and involves “Paul”, who had just joined the industry after university. His employer produced command-and-control systems for public services (think fire brigades and police). He had a one-year contract developing drivers for alarm hardware such as pagers and sirens to let all concerned know that something bad was happening and needed dealing with. “The technical setup was mostly HP, Sun and Motorola Unix workstations with QNX servers doing the dirty work, my products being located on the QNX realtime servers doing all the alarming whenever something alarming happened,” said Paul. He also did some work connecting to various shouty devices using C and C++. This all took place on the European mainland, and our hero’s office was located in a country famed for sausage, beer, and industrial metal. Every few weeks Paul would visit a client site to make sure the system worked correctly with whatever was installed at the local fire station, police HQ and so on. And so it was that he headed off, just before Christmas, to a neighbouring country to check things were ticking over at the new “centre for catastrophe protection and emergency services.” His task was, as Paul put it, to ensure the code “would finally pass… the really final attempt at passing the acceptance tests at the end of the year.” No pressure, and when things are getting a bit squeaky, who would you call? The youth fresh out of university, of course. He packed up his “portable computer” (a sewing-machine sized contraption with twin 5 1/4″ floppy drives and a 7″ CRT) and headed out to the site, nestled in the mountains.
