jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Jun 5 10:56:21 CDT 2007
Jim, >From 1980-84 I worked for Megatek, a graphics system manufacturer, back in the days when the circuitry to rotate/scale/translate/clip a (vector) graphics image was an entire pair of boards with more logic than your current motherboard. The graphics sub-system was about 40 to 90 THOUSAND dollars and had an entire board just to interface it to a specific mini-computer. Anyway, I was trained to repair these things, both in the lab (to the chip level using O'scopes and soldering irons) and to the board level. I worked both as a Field Engineer and a lab technician. One day I was in Minneapolis, in the middle of winter, taking a field service call from a city government agency which was in the middle of entering all of the maps of the water / sewer / electrical into a computer mapping database. Every time I came to work on their system, the problem would never occur so I would essentially make an educated guess as to what could cause the problem and swap a bunch of boards. This particular time, the agency actually made me a job offer to go to work for them, just sit on site and fix the problems they had whenever they occurred. The system was so critical and so expensive that they were willing to do that. Of course that was Minneapolis, and I was from San Diego, and it was winter.... Which tells you how long I actively considered their offer... But in those days you were trained to fix things. The classes for the graphics processors were several days and you learned each and every chip on each and every board, what it did, and how it worked. There were entire books of schematics, several pages for each board, which I knew like the back of my hand. I could rattle off the numeric names of all the TTL chips, registers, OR, AND, buffers. I knew the workings of every single current (at that time) Intel processor (there was an entire books for them), knew the register names, the instruction set, how long each instruction took to execute, the timing diagrams for each pin. Likewise for the memory chips, static and dynamic. There were diagnostic programs to exercise the circuits so that you could trace signals with a scope. And we were paid as if it were an important job. Of course now the graphics chip in my laptop is 100 times more powerful than the entire system that I worked on in 1981 and costs just a few dollars. And my laptop is 100 times more powerful than the DEC mini that these systems were connected to. Now you couldn't troubleshoot it with a scope if you wanted to and it would not make economic sense to do so. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 11:20 AM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC Hi Steve: If the friend had not carefully planned the whole install and based his knowledge on the equipment/software recommendations from the Dell Techs their part or lack of it would not so easily be faulted. The installation was based on instructions from Dell and an addition support contract was also purchased. There are not any Dell trained Techs who actually go on site; they just bring in hired-guns like myself. (Many years ago I (my own company) were the Dell distributor for our area. They switched to the direct-purchase model after we had established a solid government client base... and that is another story). < I don't mean to re-open any wounds, here, but this sounds like maybe the equipment being installed was not all purchased from Dell -or- the Dell on-site installation option wasn't purchased. Was Dell being balky and uncooperative because, perhaps, of "non-standard" equipment or do-it-yourself installation? I used to work for a Digital Equipment supplier/custom software house. The guys that ran it had had a very close relationship with DEC for a long time (the VP was given the contract to upgrade the PDP-8 operating system -- yes, this was some time ago; 1983-4 or so). They also had an excellent relationship with the DEC Field Service office people. So if they decided to install a new 10 MB 14" removable disk drive pack (big stuff at the time!) at a client site they could rely on getting good help from the Field Service office even though DEC itself wasn't doing the install. Things have changed since then. > I worked with a PDP 11-70, in 1980, using Intergraph software. The tech service was excellent in those days as the technicians were all fully trained. Tight competition and small margins have eliminated that era I am afraid. < Steve Erbach Neenah, WI > Jim _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com