Punch cards

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 11 April 2008, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>Tim wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 12:53 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> I had an alcoholic uncle who, during WW-II, worked as a postal delivery
>>> type in downtown Des Moines, and he usually had a radio in the bottom of
>>> his mailbag, either going back to a customer after repairs, or given to
>>> him to be repaired while he walked his route.  I think I was about 8,
>>> maybe 9 when I asked him as he was changing the filter capacitor in one
>>> of those 'all american 5 tubers', what was actually wrong with the part
>>> he was taking out, and he couldn't tell me!  He was going by a recipe on
>>> the inside of the cupboard door that said to change them if the radio had
>>> a hum.
>>
>> I remember doing work experience at a local TV repair shop while I was
>> studying electronics.  They had this set full of gremlims that had been
>> plaguing them for weeks.  Their best tech had spent ages repairing one
>> fault after another, but it was still coming up with more things needing
>> fixing.  After he expressed frustration, one of the other road techs
>> (the ones that do the house calls) had a bash at it, literally, to
>> finally get rid of the thing.  Poking and prodding boards, rather
>> roughly, with the plastic end of his screwdriver, finding everything
>> that was unreliable and needing replacing.  The set that had be worked
>> on, off and on, over weeks, was fixed in about a quarter of an
>> hour.  ;-)

Valid service technique, used it many times. :)

>In 1967 or so, when a mainframe CPU was still the size of a phone booth,
>we were running a GE 605, which was a later enhanced mil-spec version of
>the 635, and like all computers made of plug-in boards with components
>on them, it was pretty unreliable. Then we got a new FE who took the
>machine down, reseated each little board with a thumb and tap with a
>plastic mallet, and started diagnostics. As each bad board was found is
>was tossed down the computer room floor and replaced. Then doagnostics
>were run and each board got hit with a hair drier (same toss on the pile
>of dead boards), followed by the can of freon. He didn't even read the
>console, if it clattered the board was history.

Chuckle.  Along the line of can you top this, we had a pdp-11/723 that ran the 
7 meter CBS rx dish for us and it had to be the least dependable machine I've 
ever had the displeasure of dealing with.  Daily, or more often crashes & 
whoever wrote the app made compiling it from scratch part of the bootup, 
which of course since the app was written in pascal, made the bootup a 15 
minute process.  Ostensibly this was done so that a src file could be 
replaced with a new one by the data channel it monitored, that hopefully had 
that bug fixed & all use poor schmucks out at the affiliates had to do to 
effect an upgrade was a reboot.

I finally had my fill of it when the crashes caused transponder changes during 
a local break to be missed started costing us money because we were carrying 
a dog food spot that should have been a toothpaste spot etc.  I called Dec's 
FSE office and told them to bring another machine cuz they were gonna 
warranty this one.  They already knew the route very well.  They came in and 
couldn't do that because the serial number was part of the contract, but the 
serial number was on an inactive piece of the frame rail.  So when they got 
done we had replaced, and boot tested, every piece in that thing except that 
one frame rail.  And its uptime went down even more.  Then it was 2 hours, 
maybe.

I took to growling at CBS every time it locked up, making the night crew leave 
messages for Hugo if he wasn't there, the whole MaryAnn.  Finally, I got Hugo 
where he wanted out too, so he volunteered to trade my machine for his test 
mule, which always worked even when it was being used to verify a customers 
part had failed.  I made the switch the next weekend, and sent him mine.  His 
mule was a block of marble, it just sat there and ran for the next 6 months, 
at which time Hugo was so far behind cuz he couldn't even get it to boot for 
him, and CBS decided it was time to fix it, so we all got a box with an IBM 
plus an ARTIC card that did all the work since the i386 in the main boxes 
only job was to handle the incoming data and hand it off to the ARTIC card, 
and to init the ARTIC card at bootup.  In a sense, I caused CBS to replace 
several hundred of those PDP-11/723's.

And when it was done, my grin wouldn't fit into my hard hat that night I had 
to put on to ride my Suzuki GS-1000-G home.  I had to actually answer the 
phone to find out what was wrong again.

>After that we ran for 35 days, and a counter in the OS overflowed and
>the system crashed. There were about several hundred of these in use,
>they had been out for five years or so, and no one had ever hit that
>overflow before! What does that say about reliability...

A lot!

>In 1996 I booted a 386sx-16 on Linux 2.0.13, using computer show parts,
>and ran until Y2k. Unless you were around in the bad old days where you
>reseated memory chips with every boot of your "home computer" and
>counted crashes per month on mainframes, you can't really get a feel for
>how good we have it now.

+1 on that too, Bill.

>The machine was called glacial, because of performance rather than
>because it was cool, but it served DNS for 4+years. There was a counter
>which overflowed in Linux at that time, but it never bit me.
>
>--
>Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
>   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
>the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I'm not an Iranian!!  I voted for Dianne Feinstein!!