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Comment by dannypgh | Hacker News Reader

Claiming that "high availability" started with the internet seems to ignore the role that Telcos (Bell Labs?) have played in our field and modern technological world.

The engineering work to deliver five nines of availability for POTS shouldn't be omitted in a piece about the history of HA, in my opinion.

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I think it's ignored because the story is focused on databases' HA.

My impression from my limited telco experience (correct me if it's wrong) is that there was not much "database stuff" happening in telcos back in the days: only dispatch tables and call duration records come to mind. With then prevailing post-call billing, I assume a lot of the hard constraints on consistency were not there.

Banks and telcos both had database systems that had zero downtime in 20 years, in some case. Tandem Non-Stop was very real - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers)

They still are :D

Custom cameras and mechanical counters at one stage I believe.

Though telcos have much higher standards when it comes to the network / exchanges major failure's where meant to never happen.

And telcos did that with much weaker hardware than is available today!

Weaker in terms of processing power, but the robustness of telco hardware up until the mid-80's is ridiculous - over-engineering was the rule and did deliver excellent availability, though at high cost.

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