John K Mitchell's Misc Blog

Finally, Christmas is over. I mentioned in an earlier article about the shop who had problems with their "quick pay" system. Well, two days before Christmas I thought I'd give them another try - I wanted a Yamaha keyboard as a present for someone and I knew that they stocked them.

I went to their website and eventually found what I was looking for. "Great, I'll reserve one and pick it up" I thought. The only problem was that the stores website timed out going to the next page. I was trying to reserve the keyboard for over half an hour before I gave up and went else where.

In the old days we always used to test computer programmes and system as individual units and then, once we were happy with the results, we went onto stress testing. In the late 70's this involved having someone at every terminal using the same jobs and also running background processes to really test record locking, processor power and so on. Once we got to the mid 80's I remember using specialised tools that acted link users (we once had the equivalent of over 200 users on a PDP mini by using one such tool to test a new order processing programme).

It seems that many of the lessons learnt in the IT world during those days have now been forgotten. I suppose it's down to the cost of hardware - if there is a problem throw more memory or an extra disc or cpu at it. My first ever IT job was in a 800+ bedroom hotel where we ran the entire back office stock control (food and drink), purchase and sales ledgers and menu costing on a system that had 32kb of memory and 2 small hard disks. All guest accounts were run on a 2nd machine with a similar spec. I gather that todays musical brithday cards have more processing power (and the PC i'm sitting at here - 2 x 80gb drives + 1 x 300 gb, 1gb of RAM is many times more powerful than that PDP15).