On Sat, 6 Feb 2016 15:04:44 -0700, Tony Hwang
wrote:

philo wrote:
On 02/06/2016 02:17 PM, wrote:

I did write an inventory program in dBase.
Trying to get a bunch of hardware guys to actually use a computer was
tough but if you make the user interface easier than filling out paper
logs, they will do it. I barcoded everything and made it a design
point that nobody ever had to enter the same thing twice. It ended up
being pretty successful. Even the hard core critics became fans after
they stopped "losing" parts.
Fof a few years I did actual "board level" repairs on motherboards -
replacing chips and installing "flywires" to correct manufacturing
errors. Sometimes I even had to do the base troubleshooting to
determine where the problem wa.



snip


I guess I can tell this story now, regarding "flywires".

The company I worked for many years ago, among other things manufactured
controls for industrial battery chargers.My job was field service and I
reported "bugs" the engineers had to fix.

Our engineers were just "moonlighters" who worked for a large (unnamed)
electronics corporation who supplied the avionics for a large (unnamed)
passenger plane manufacturer.


On day a customer told us he did not like to see those "green wires" on
the circuit boards. When I reported this to the chief engineer, he just
laughed and said "but it's a battery charger we have planes flying with
those green wires."


Never had a problem though.

So no one worked on a system made of vacuum tubes? Machine code
programmed punching holes on preindented blank cards with tip of pen or
pencil? Handled tape reels as big as small car wheels? Those were the
days. Memory was magnetic core bits with write wire, read wire, inhibit
wire(erasing bit) going thru the dunut holds. Stack of 4K memory was
bigger than a all in one mini PC box. Tube system needed tons of a/c
unit to keep the room cool..... Nowadays most field changes come down in
the form of software update/change. Rarely they do wiring change.

I was contemporary with the 603 (vacuum tube) machines but I was a
1401/1620 guy.
I am very familiar with core storage and we actually used it on
machines as late as the first ten S/370 145s. We had 2 of them in
suburban DC. They were lab machines, being used while they were still
developing the solid state storage that went into the production S/370
but when IBM was selling them faster than we could build them, the lab
machines were sent into the field to IBM internal locations for
production work. We had S/N 10001 in Gaithersburg and 10002 in
Wheaton.
We dod board level engineering changes until "mainframes" became
"computers on a card" in a rack.
You used a tiny "hole saw" type tool to delete the land patterns to
the pins and wire wrap in the new circuit.
Back in the discrete transistor (SMS card) there were still a few of
us who fixed cards but only when a new one was not quickly available.
( 2 hours)
I actually fixed a core storage array on a 3890 one afternoon because
a new one would have to fly in from Atlanta and they needed to capture
the checks by 2100 or lose the float on about a million bucks.
It gave the "new guy" a little street cred after I moved here.