I hate you all

[Roy Smith]

In article <kjpet5$n35$2 at reader1.panix.com>,
 Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 2013-04-05, terminatorul at gmail.com <terminatorul at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [Mad that in 3.3 you can no longer use ambiguous mixtures of spaces
> and tabs within a single indent level.]
> 
> My boss would refer to this as a failure to be "bug-compatible" with
> the previous version.
> 
> Whether or not to maintain bug-compatibility when you bring out a new
> version is one of the eternal debates.  No matter what you do, it's
> going to annoy somebody...

I remember the first VAX was got.  We used some third-party serial card 
because it cost a small fraction of the official DEC version.  We had 
all sorts of trouble with it.  Eventually it turned out that the 
third-party card was operating correctly according to the DEC specs, but 
the driver had been written to work against genuine DEC hardware, which 
didn't follow their own published spec!

I vaguely remember it had to do with how the DMA processor dealt with 
odd-sized block transfers.  As I recall, there was a software patch to 
the driver which allowed it to work with the correctly implemented 
hardware, but I could be messing up most of the details.

Great machine, that VAX.  For only $100k, three or four people could 
play rogue at the same time!