Hacks

1994-07-20-02.jpg As you may have figured out by now, reading my other entries, I had disassembled the machine control task on the AEG MLOCR/CS and understood it probably as well as anyone on Terra, at the time. One day I found the place where it used precious CPU cycles formatting and printing the statistics for the STP (Storage Transfer Processor [?]), part of the Remote Coding system. I had not expected to find such code in the real-time control task. Disgusting!

Also, if I remember correctly, system 'pool' space was being used up to dangerous levels and nobody knew why. When it got too bad, we had to restart the mail processing software. When I found this code, I realized that the problem was right here. And there was another, lower-priority task running on the machine that was more ideally suited to this task. So I rewrote the code and added some features, and patched it into the 'UPDATE' task, patching MA to $SDAT (send data) the necessary information to UPDATE. It was a nice hack, and probably might have been implemented except that the replacement of PDP-11 computers with VAXen was well towards completion by then.

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