Forgotten Voice

Name:
Martin West
Department:
Punch and Verifier / 360 hardware engineer, Software CE
Location:
London
When:
Date Joined:
1st September 1968
Date Left:
July 2000
The Day I Broke BOC's UK Network

I was a software engineer, fresh off my MVS internals course, working at the BOC company HQ offices above Top Shop at Oxford Circus, where incidentally my daughter now works in the same offices as a Head Merchandiser for Wallis. To avoid printing out mountains of paper for MVS dumps, I had written an online dump viewing program while on the MVS internals course. While at BOC I had written additional functions for which I used a dynamic loading mechanism. The first time I tried this new function out the system went down, when it came back up I tried again and the system went down!

This system, a 158MP, was running BOCs UK network. So with some trepidation I went down to the computer room to plead mea culpa, expecting to get a bit of . However I got a totally different reaction, the Ops Manager put his arm round my shoulder and said “Thank god it was you and not one of my dumb programmers, we would have been up and down all day”. After investigation I found I had managed to hit an MVS bug.