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December 21, 2005

Something you *don't* want to see...

For once, this is not a post about AspectJ!

Not wanting to name names, but I was using the woolwich cashpoint in southampton airport terminal building last night. I put my card into the machine, entered my pin, selected the amount of cash I wanted to withdraw.... whirr, whirr, whirr, clunk. Blank screen for several seconds, then the cash machine started rebooting! The boot sequence of a cash machine that has your card in it is not something you want to see. The thing that surprised me as the cash machine slowly came back into life is that is was running on.......... OS/2 Warp!!! There's an operating system I haven't seen in a long time. Making some educated guesses, that probably means the operator is a "blue" company, and that the back end was probably CICS running on Z/OS - which gives me some comfort as the 2PC probably worked and I won't be charged for the cash I never got (though I'm still going to check my statement ;)).

I never got my card back of course (the machine swallowed it for good - which if you think about it is all you can safely design it to do, since if the user has walked away in disgust in the interim period, spitting the card back out wouldn't exactly be safe). So I had to call my bank and cancel the card. It should take about 3 working days to get me a new one they reckon. So I have no card and no cash in the run-up to Christmas :(.

And yes, this is a true story, not just a ploy to get you to buy the round this Christmas!!

Posted by adrian at December 21, 2005 10:01 AM [permalink]

Comments

Adrian,

US retail chain called "Bed Bath and Beyond" uses OS/2 Warp for their in-store workstations (POS, inventory checks, etc.) with CICS running on the back-end.

Posted by: Dmitriy Kopylenko [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 21, 2005 08:54 PM

Do you mean, you don't have a back up card? Isn't it time for a back of everything. I am paranoid about back-ups after coupla huge data loses.

Posted by: Brajeshwar [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 23, 2005 07:05 PM

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