The Sad Tale Of The Alpha Massacre
The Register, Monday, November 11th, 2024
Welcome, once again, to Who, Me? in which Register readers share tales of tech support moments they might prefer to forget. But forgetting is not a way to learn from mistakes, is it?
This week's hero is a veteran we'll Regomize as "Gandalf" for such is the grayness of his beard nowadays. Back in less gray years, though, Gandalf worked for a significant - but now defunct - database maker.
Primary development was carried out on SunOS, but the developer also maintained releases for HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, Siemens Nixdorf UNIX, SCO UNIX, Linux and Windows NT among other exotic operating systems. Gandalf was on the porting team, whose mission was to back-port releases and fixes to the relevant platform branch, run the full suite of tests, and prepare software for release.