Thoughts in the wee hours of the morning

[Miles Sandin]

Folks,

 

From 1963 to 1967 I was 1620… From 1967 to whenever I was 1130…

 

I am following with great fascination the restoration efforts of you folks.  Something dawned on me during the night.  Times have certainly changed and I’m not sure of the results. 

 

In those years, there was a tremendous workforce of highly intelligent, skilled workers, all over the place.

 

Just in my little area of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, there were numerous folks working for IBM and their customers. (This was also true of the other computer manufacturers.) SE’s, CE’s, sales folks. These folks knew, learned and taught much.  Any time we had an issue, we could call and someone would arrive shortly to assist.

 

Whole industries were created.  The delivery trucks brought us cases of continuous forms, “IBM” cards, tapes, disk packs, etc.  I can’t even guess how many 5 box cases of 2000 IBM cards went through our company.

 

Today, you just don’t see this.  Where are the folks who know how to read a schematic, use an oscilloscope, and all the other highly technical skills.  They don’t walk among us like in “olden days”.  I suspect they’re concentrated in certain factories and communities around the world, but not all over the place like before.  I don’t see the dark suit, white shirt and dark tie… They seemed to have disappeared.

 

Movies such as “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13” take me back to those times.

 

Someone posted a comment the other day.  It showed a two page ad from Radio Shack full of “goodies” to buy… TRS-80, answering machine, walkie talkies… all sorts of stuff.  Today my cell phone does all that and more.

 

Times have changed.

 

Miles Sandin

Bridgewater VA.

 

[Dave G4UGM]

IBM Service still has some of the mainframe guys employed. I retired recently, but even when I worked I only saw one on odd occaisions. Our IBM xSeries servers rarely failed, and when they did they tended to ship the replacement part, usually a disk drive or a SIMM. We did have one on site about five years ago when a big mail server failed, but new stack of VMWare boxes will just restart the work on another box if one actually fails. They did come on site to replace the motherboards in Laptops but made no attempt to fix on site. You can’t replace a large Surface Mount chip on-site. It needs specialist tools so it makes sense to repair off-site…

 

Dave

G4UGM

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[Carl Claunch]

Perhaps they are waiting at the Genius Bar in the local Apple store?

(he ducks to avoid the thrown tomatos from the group)

[Dave G4UGM]

I teach “Windows Server Administration” to second year under grads. (Don’t all block me it pays around $50 an hour) and two of my students work in the local apple store…..

… nice lads, and probably OK on apple stuff…

 

Dave

P.S. the one who is a real apple head got turned down…..

 

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[Yvette S. Hirth, CCP, CDP]

> On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 5:05:55 AM UTC-7, miles wrote:

(snippage)

> Today, you just don’t see this. Where are the folks who know how to
> read a schematic, use an oscilloscope, and all the other highly
> technical skills. They don’t walk among us like in “olden days”.

i can only speak for myself. i'm still here, working now on several
"firmware" (h/w + s/w) projects, with my fluke scopemeter, dining room
table top power supply, and a lotta soldah.

and just to prove my creds, i've got an IBM 'scope in the garage
(Textronix). bought it off eBay because in the '60's and '70's the IBM
SE's had 'em and i was envious...

> Times have changed.

actually, i'm liking modern times more!

yvette

[Robert Lerche]

Ah yes, I have a 'scope tucked away in the garage (used it once or twice on embedded system projects), bought at an auction.

Sure, things have changed but some things are the same as ever ... no matter how much disk storage you have it fills up.

yvette

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[John R Pierce]

On 4/2/2015 11:08 AM, Robert Lerche wrote:
> Ah yes, I have a 'scope tucked away in the garage (used it once or
> twice on embedded system projects), bought at an auction.

and I have a nice fully functional B&K 2120A someone gave me last year
(he got it from a widower who asked him to clear out her deceased
husband's e-Junk)... its only a 20Mhz dualtrace, but its been
sufficient for me to use for diagnosing various things. Back in my
days of working with CP/M, I frequently used a scope to help debug
device driver software that had to be run in realtime (you can't exactly
take a breakpoint in a interrupt handler thats doing DMA management).

> Sure, things have changed but some things are the same as ever ... no
> matter how much disk storage you have it fills up.

indeed, the 7.4TiB usable home NAS I built 2 years ago for backups and
video streaming is nearing full. its 4 x 3 TB drives in raidz (raidz
is the ZFS equivalent of raid5). my chassis only holds 4 disks, so
either i'll have to replace all 4 with 6TB drives (ouch), or get an
expansion chassis and SAS controller to run 4+ more drives.

1st world problems, hah!

--
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

[James Field]

MY own 'scope was a Telequipment model. It's a cheap Tectronix version.
At IPSA UK we used it to
tune, analyse and improve our "Post Office" transalantic links by
analysing the QAM (quaduature amplitude modulation)
used on our interconentanal [transatlantic] links.

It works well at audio frequencies appropriate for frequency division
and simple time division mux operation.

Fast Fourier transforms have allowed a huge increase in bandwidth today.

Cheap and cheerful 'scopes seem to be available for a few hundred
quid[pounds].

Any recommendations?

Jim GW7 JSH