ERCC was subcontracted by the SERC to manage a large DECSystem 10 on behalf of science & engineering users based around the UK. As part of that contract Dr Bill Hay, Keith Farvis and myself maintained the TOPS-10 operating system and associated utilities. There was a massive amount of software to maintain, including: SAIL, Bliss 10, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, DECNet, X.25 and of course Dec-10 assembler. The machine was under constant upgrade cycles to satisfy the demanding requirements of the SERC scientists. Two of our users were David Milne and Peter Denyer, both of whom have ended up as successful business entrepreneurs.

Bill, Keith and I had access to the source code for TOPS-10 and we were very self proficient in finding and reporting TOPS-10 bugs back to DEC. If the problem was fairly intractable then we had a software support contract with DEC. I remember one particular incident when we had the support of a DEC TOPS-10 Software Specialist, a guy called Dick Baker-Munton, to diagnose a particularly nasty and intermittent operating system crash (these were the days when software guys poured over octal/hexadecimal dumps and hardware engineers attached oscilloscopes to machines and brandished soldering irons). Dick's strategy was to handcraft some system traps into TOPS-10 and to take his sleeping bag into the machine room and to stay there until the crash appeared. His commitment was such that I think he was in there for about three nights!! I guess on health and safety grounds that this would not be allowed today but, even if it was, could you imagine Microsoft doing this??

-- David Mercer

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