Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure, Economic Hardships and Dual Survival

Ralph DiMola rdimola at evergreeninfo.net
Thu Jan 24 19:47:45 EST 2013


Tom,

It Hurts I know. I was in Japan in the 1980's using Vax VMS and had a team
working on a global stock product for Citicorp using their global network of
the day. It was 11:00pm and everyone had left and I was backing up the what
was to be the production SW the next day. I grabbed the wrong tape and the
HD crashed in the middle of the backup. The other tapes were too old. I had
the "pit-in-your-gut" thing and smoked about five cigarettes in a row.
Smoking in the office, how quaint but I digress. I spent the night dumping
all the readable sectors to text files and putting the fragments together by
hand. I salvaged about 80% of the code. But this caused the programmer to
rewrite about 50% of the code in an all night session the next day. Well it
came out better, only one day late and some lost pride. I get chills just
thinking about.

Thinking of you big guy!

Hope you can come to Edinburgh. The first pint is on me.

Ralph DiMola
IT Director
Evergreen Information Services
rdimola at evergreeninfo.net





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