HALT LOAD
The first post on the rebuilt blog celebrates HALT LOAD, the mainframe boot milestone from my 1996 Unisys co-op that earned the team ice cream and a cynical coworker’s “milk and cookies” quip.
# HALT LOAD Getting this to render as the first blog post in the new Logical Disconnect system is a celebration and a fun way to show that I’m making progress. ## Backstory I worked at Unisys as a Drexel Co-op in 1996. I learned a ton about working in businesses and about how computers worked. My team was building an IO manager for an A-Series Mainframe. The chip on the so-called CIOM was designed by Unisys therefore had it’s own opcodes based on a 108 bit word. So I would write microcode in a macro language. The specification of what the chip should do was written in C code called the flows. My job was to run tests written in ADA against a Windows emulator of the chip which would load up the latest version of the code and execute the tests. When a test failed I had to either fix the test or fix the microcode. While I was there the CIOM project achieved HALT LOAD which was a milestone in the boot lifecycle of the A-Series. It basically was an objective measure that we were no longer failing to almost boot. When this milestone was reached there was a celebration. There was a banner on the wall in the cafeteria congratulating the team for reaching HALT LOAD and they gave us ice-cream. The person shared a cube with named Steve had a cynical take on this and said, “Here is where they give us milk and cookies.” I always like making obscure references and then trying to get them to catch on in groups I’m in. Ideally they are meaningful in some way and the cynical take mixed with the actual objective measure is one of my favorite parts of this. I like to use HALT LOAD as a cry of celebration when I wish the work I was doing would go faster. So in some ways I’m embracing the cynicism that could be present, but also I always use it in a time of celebration when I actually see a thing I’m doing work. Since I decided to take on this project of resurrecting my blog and taking back control from SquareSpace I wanted the first post before I even put code in the system to be a tribute to this. So may your LOADS always HALT, or something. I actually am not very clear at all on the boot lifecycle of an A-Series mainframe and wasn’t really at the time. But let’s keep HALT LOAD alive regardless. I think some of the fun of obscure references is explaining it to others and bringing them into your circle.