Forgotten Voice

I was at CEGB who had a model 85 running HASP. They had been sold some new hard drives on shared channels, after installation the system started intermittently hanging. To cut a long story short it turned out the channel after initiating the IO disconnected and if another IO came in on the other half of the channel the first IO could never get back in.

After discussion with the HASP development team their response was “If you read page 10 of the reference guide you will see that your explicit configuration is not supported, good luck” and the phone went dead. The customer software engineer team of which I was part had to redesign the MVS io scheduling to circumvent this problem, the alternative was a tad expensive as meant providing the customer with a significant amount of free hardware.