| Things are different when "mission-critical" is the highest priority. Before PC's really got popular, I went out to a petroleum pipeline installation one time where they were just unboxing one of these Tandem rigs. They were going to use it to further automate, control, and account for transfers like some of the other oil companies were doing with their mainframes. As part of an expected technology advance at the time. Here it was not just a CRT terminal and a printer, but the whole thing right there in a fairly hazardous location in the blockhouse office where contractors would do their hand calculations. I was there to take readings on the mechanical totalizers, especially on the piping section we had independently calibrated, and bring samples back to the lab for precision viscosity and density determination to more decimal places than available elsewhere. Along with all kinds of other routine and research parameters. Turns out I was the pioneer in digital densitometry among the multinational contractors. That's another story altogether but within a decade they all had it and I was in more demand after the niche had grown than it was when I owned the niche. People still never want me to stop. Anyway, I had a pretty good handle on floating-point error and was doing my part to reign it in with improvements in physical measurement. It didn't take long to realize that my Atari would be basically capable of handling all of the things they were going to use the Tandem for. The shortcomings would be the redundancy/reliability and Atari just couldn't count that high :) When you're moving large numbers of barrels the numbers go through the roof when you convert to liters or even worse, some currencies. If the figures didn't agree very well with manual calculation using 16-digit calculators, some big shot may very well hit the roof. I would have had to hook two Ataris together and try to get more precision somehow at the same time as try some redundant reliability. Never did. Although within a couple years I did hook up two TRS-80s together and they were quite adversarial . . . |