Power outage now my server asks for fck, what to do?

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 07 January 2021 12:46:08 Liam Proven wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Jan 2021 at 13:42, Gilles Gravier <ggravier at fsfe.org> wrote:
> > I would seriously disagree if you did, Liam. :) I've been
> > programming in Assembly (6800, 68k, z80, NSC800, 6502) since the
> > 1980s, on mainframes in FORTRAN and ADA in the 1990s on VAX 8600 and
> > SPERRY 1100 , in C, C++ and Java (I was a betatester for the first
> > ever Java programming course when I was at Sun Microsystems in
> > 1995)... I might total more computing experience than quite a few
> > added up here. :)
>
> Blimey. Well, I started in the early '80s too, but I never got as far
> as assembly. I just bought an Archimedes so I could run BASIC at the
> speed of assembly code on an 8-bit. ;-)
>
> Recently trying to resurrect my ancient Pascal knowledge...
>
> > That is why I use Ubuntu on some machines, Windows on others, and
> > whatever actually makes the most sense on the platform and for the
> > job at hand...
>
> Fair. My home desktop is an iMac, partly because I like macOS, and
> partly because I can use my own choice of keyboard and mouse on a
> desktop. I dislike modern Apple ones. So my laptops are pre-chiclet
> Thinkpads, with Ubuntu, and my work machines are Dells. Windows is for
> reflashing firmware, mostly.
>
> > I've had my share of having to fsck (and fsck -y) Unix disks...
> > before Linux was born.
> >
> :-) Oh, me too...
>
My first computer was a board with 256 bytes of ram, speaking 1802 
machine code thru a hex monitor. I bought an s-100 board backplane and 
built it, followed by $400 for 4k of static ram, and looking up the hex 
in the 1802 programmers manual, wrote a program to aid productions use 
of an automatic station break machine, reducing the number of copy 
operations to make a commercial by one and making a very noticeable 
improvement in the on air product, in 1978. I left instructions on how 
to edit it to change the tape machine ballistics as machines improved, 
then went on down the road, In Salem OR to see an aunt who was 
approaching the end of her time in 1994, I called that station to ask if 
my gizmo was still running, and was told it was still in several times a 
day use.  That's eons in a tv stations control room gear life.  And I 
still have a typewritten paper copy on the shelf above me, an a 
broadcast audio cart with several copies of it for backup.

I did much the same thing at my last tv station. We had bought a GVG 
300A/B production video switcher for a song when Penny's closed their 
NYC production house which came with the manuals for its config storage, 
but not with the storage since it was an extra $20k.  So I wrote, for a 
color computer-2, running os9level 1.01, in basic-09, the functional equ 
to their $20k toy. But where theirs had a 2 digit switch to select the 
personality, mine had a video interface with English filesnames, and was 
4x faster than theirs. Wrote the program on their time and it was in 
several times a day use thru the end of that switcher and another much 
better condition one just like it we got from KTLA, a span of 14 years. 
I retired, and it was dying so when it was finally pulled out, they gave 
me back that coco and its disk drives so they are stocking a box in the 
basement right now. I also used that comm channel into it as a 
troubleshooting tool on many occasions.

Now I'm just another 86 year old fart, trying to stay busy with a garage 
full of cnc machinery I've built till the end. And alone these days. The 
lady standing beside me on my web pages front page for the last 31 yeas 
passed from COPD a month ago.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>