[dba-Tech] Petulant PC

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

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