Here's one for the DEC engineers

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Wed Nov 8 08:53:24 2000

>Bill Pechter wrote:

> The only problem with CSSE is they made it so easy to work on the DEC
> stuff Field Service management began hiring the clueless to work cheap
> and they lost a lot of the clued folks to people who changed the board
> with the RED led lit. One day they worked on VT220's the next they
> were promoted to your VAX cluster!

Jerome Fine replies:

Was high voltage a problem working inside a VAX cluster? If not,
then from what I have heard, that may have been a demotion.

I was told that while working on an 11/34A, one fellow from DEC
Field Circus blew all the boards in the backplane when he removed
the memory - seems that he forgot to turn off the power!!

I realize that most DEC techs were not as clueless as this example
(since even I know that the power must be turn off - and I have
rarely forgotten to do so - haha), but it might be best to not assume
what all your fellows were able to do - or at least management
thought they could do.

> DEC's designs were among the most maintainable and reliable.
> Of all the companies I've worked for, only IBM had stuff as well
> designed for maintainance and with reliable, well designed, field
> modifyable diagnostis.

This I do agree with - although I can't vouch for the IBM side.
I often complained about the tension on an IBM 029 keypunch.
I was in the habit of holding either one card drum or the other
to either remove or insert an extra character in the card - remember
when we used to program with a card deck that took 24 hours
to be returned? If the tension was correct, it could be done
with either drum. On occasion when I complained, the tech
refused to accept my assertion that it could be done and therefore
that removing or inserting a character was a valid test. Naturally,
since the tech knew more than I did, he sometimes refused to
"fix" the key punch. At that point, depending on how desperate
I was (if there was another keypunch around), I just went along
or "insisted" that the tension on the key punch be brought up
to "normal" specifications. I could never understand why a tech
would insist that the tension was OK when it obviously was not
just because I wanted to do something non-standard 0.01% of
the time (which would obviously not hurt the keypunch if done
so rarely), especially when 99% of all keypunches could do that
operation since almost all had the tension set correctly.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Wed Nov 08 2000 - 08:53:24 GMT