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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#21

Post by hermitdev »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

>>> they might have been too scared to write it. When looking back on the origin of RAID, one of the original developers confessed, “It really wasn’t made to last that long. Sorry!” This speaks to me - too many times we think we need clever architecture and well thought out methodologies and ... the most useful tools are a mix of inspiration and timing and luck. Had the developers stopped to plan they would have buil…

> Had the developers stopped to plan they would have built something with over 16 bits of primary key

While true, this was in the 16-bit, Windows 1.x era. Also the ~640kb of RAM era (disks also werent that big either, DOS (v3.x) around that time only supported 32 MB partitions). Not sure which version of DOS Windows 1.0 ran on, I didnt use windows until v3.11 for Workgroups. A 32-bit primary key would likely have been seen as wasteful (not that I'm excusing it) and impractical, because you could likely never practically store more than 64k records on a PC of the day (and even if you could, you wouldnt have an disk left to do anything else).

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#24

Post by hermitdev »

khy wrote: post #11

It's a weird, nice feeling watching your software in use well beyond it's planned - or more frequently, assumed - obsolescence.

What ammuses me is looking at some of the hard-coded "end of time" dates at previous employers. Instead of using null as an unbounded upper bound (because nulls are hard /s), there are hard coded "end dates". One was 2032-12-31, another 2037-12-31 and usually 9999-12-31. Obviously, these all have problems, especially when used in finance. 2037 makes sense, because 2037 is the year that 32bit linux overflows. 9999 also makes sense. At least none of us will be around, so it's some future generation(s) problem. The 2032 one made no sense to me, and I was never able to get a justification.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#25

Post by why_only_15 »

jkcorrea wrote: post #9

Fun fact: Apple's internal bug tracking tool, Radar, traces its origins to a pen-and-paper tracking system from the very early days. In a similar fashion to RAID from the article, it's use expanded way beyond the original use case and is now used by nearly every team at Apple, from hardware, to test, to marketing, retail, and everything in between. It's often the butt of a lot of jokes as most people hate its dated a…

It even has a cute avatar, Annika the Anteater, that a bunch of people have plushes of

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#26

Post by gdwatson »

hermitdev wrote: post #21
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

>>> they might have been too scared to write it. When looking back on the origin of RAID, one of the original developers confessed, “It really wasn’t made to last that long. Sorry!” This speaks to me - too many times we think we need clever architecture and well thought out methodologies and ... the most useful tools are a mix of inspiration and timing and luck. Had the developers stopped to plan they would have buil…

> Had the developers stopped to plan they would have built something with over 16 bits of primary key While true, this was in the 16-bit, Windows 1.x era. Also the ~640kb of RAM era (disks also werent that big either, DOS (v3.x) around that time only supported 32 MB partitions). Not sure which version of DOS Windows 1.0 ran on, I didnt use windows until v3.11 for Workgroups. A 32-bit primary key would likely have bee…

He didn’t say which platform it ran on. Was Microsoft still using Xenix internally at the time?

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#28

Post by swrobel »

why_only_15 wrote: post #25
jkcorrea wrote: post #9

Fun fact: Apple's internal bug tracking tool, Radar, traces its origins to a pen-and-paper tracking system from the very early days. In a similar fashion to RAID from the article, it's use expanded way beyond the original use case and is now used by nearly every team at Apple, from hardware, to test, to marketing, retail, and everything in between. It's often the butt of a lot of jokes as most people hate its dated a…

It even has a cute avatar, Annika the Anteater, that a bunch of people have plushes of

Tried to find a pic... Does Apple secrecy really extend that far?

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#29

Post by kaibee »

hermitdev wrote: post #24
khy wrote: post #11

It's a weird, nice feeling watching your software in use well beyond it's planned - or more frequently, assumed - obsolescence.

What ammuses me is looking at some of the hard-coded "end of time" dates at previous employers. Instead of using null as an unbounded upper bound (because nulls are hard /s), there are hard coded "end dates". One was 2032-12-31, another 2037-12-31 and usually 9999-12-31. Obviously, these all have problems, especially when used in finance. 2037 makes sense, because 2037 is the year that 32bit linux overflows. 9999 als…

Now that it's 2020, I've been looking for a new year to think of as "the future". 2040 seems too obvious and maybe too far away to really imagine, what just add 20 years? Boring. I think I'll take 2032.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#30

Post by [deleted] »

jkcorrea wrote: post #9

Fun fact: Apple's internal bug tracking tool, Radar, traces its origins to a pen-and-paper tracking system from the very early days. In a similar fashion to RAID from the article, it's use expanded way beyond the original use case and is now used by nearly every team at Apple, from hardware, to test, to marketing, retail, and everything in between. It's often the butt of a lot of jokes as most people hate its dated a…

[deleted]
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