[rescue] Perverse Question

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes, inter alia ...
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 11:53:24PM -0400, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> > It was not at all unusual for things to come up "out of balance" because
of
> > transactions that got made-cancelled-remade and where one of the steps
got
> > bollixed up, or because of storage read/write problems.  When that
happened,
> > we were supposed to find the transaction (easy if it as an odd amount
like
> > $136.47, but near impossible if it was $100.00), _edit_the_transaction_
to
> > make things balance, and re-run all the batches.
>
> Well, in that case, I suppose I can see doing it, and maybe you didn't
> have the resources needed to re-run faulty programs.

Well, we had the same resources to fix it that we had used to break it, I
guess.  What we didn't have was time. We had to run all this stuff between
the last branch's closing time (5:00 PM) and the first branch's opening time
(9:00 AM) in order to be able to process customer transactions when the bank
opened.  If we weren't on-line and running at 9:01 AM, the DP manager got a
call from the CEO.

Running the entire lot of batches took about 10 of the 16 hours, if nothing
went wrong.  However, given the nature of late-sixties computers that used
mechanically-coded magnetic cards for random-access storage, a night without
significant problems was pretty rare.  So we had to fix things as best we
could.

http://www.aboutlegacycoding.com/Articles/V/V50205.asp for more info on the
CRAM units we used on the NCR 315.

I have no idea what the FSLIC/FDIC thought of this, but, given that how to
edit master records was in the console prodedure book, I suppose it was SOP
everywhere in those days.

-Shel