Aucbvax.2295 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Wed Jul 15 08:38:33 1981 Reliablity >From BHYDE@BBNG Wed Jul 15 08:36:51 1981 Folks, There are very few new ideas that computing has had to date. The keystroke backup file is only the editor instantiation of a very old idea; double entry bookkeeping. An idea that some have blamed all capitalism on. As each transaction occurs in any organization it is recorded in two places, the journal and the account book that it is related to. These two sets of books are stored in separate places if at all possible and either set can be used to reconstruct the other. This is a very important reliability mechanism since it is the only one that is acceptable to accounting organizations. As the only "certified" mechanism it is the only primitive available for most commercial systems to achieve reliability. Thus the terms audit trail or journaling are very popular in commercial product offerings. Ben Hyde. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.