• Neuromancer
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    364 months ago

    The more disk you had, the longer it took. It walked the scsi bus which took forever. So if you had more disk. It took even longer.

    Since everything was remote, you’d have to call hands and they weren’t technical. Also no cameras since it was the 90’s.

    Now when I restart a vm or container. I panic if it’s not back up in 10 minutes.

    • @CanadaPlus
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      44 months ago

      Why would you design a disk driver that way?

      • Neuromancer
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        94 months ago

        It isn’t a disk driver since the OS is not loaded yet. It is the hardware identifying each disk in the SCSI chain. Not sure what else it was doing walking the bus much I know finding all the disk was the longest part.

        • @CanadaPlus
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          4 months ago

          Shoot, it did occur to me that might not technically be the right word.

          Still, even if you’re an engineer in the late 80’s, it seems like it would be obvious you need a way for disks to announce themselves in O(1) time. Was it just a limitation of interoperability between vendors or something?

          • Neuromancer
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            04 months ago

            I think it was just a limit of how quick everything ran back then. Also, this was an IBM system that was checked, double-checked, and triple-checked because it was a mission-critical system. IBM used to be known for quality hardware. Hard to imagine because they are such a crap company now but that was the equivalent of a google back then.