> On Jul 6, 2025, at 7:08 PM, Brendan McNeill via cctalk
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I’m loving these stories, those of us who were field engineers have many to
> share.
>
> I started out as an FE with CDC in the 1970’s here in New Zealand and then
> moved to Data General five years later. CDC was a very conservative, button
> downed company - For example, no new systems were installed until the
> complete spares kit had arrived, everything was properly documented. DG on
> the other hand was the wild west by comparison. The only thing that mattered
> was quarterly revenues. Sure, spare parts existed but not always where you
> wanted them to be located!
>
> One time I took a call for a disk related problem at a remote site on the
> West Coast of New Zealand. The customer had a DG commercial system like the
> one in this advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqqjRBqhHI and a
> couple of ‘zebra’ 100mb disks, of the washing machine size. The system disk
> had failed and they couldn’t reboot from it. Fortunately they hadn’t
> powered it off as the voice coil had gone open circuit. No spare parts of
> course, so I manually retracted the heads, powered off the drive, removed the
> voice coil and used a scalpel to cut away the former around the area where
> the external wires entered the coil. Re-crimped the wires, obtained some
> epoxy resin from a hardware store, and a couple of ice creams on a stick.
> Used the sticks as a ‘former’ to hold the epoxy resin. Half an hour later
> they were back up and running. The disk never failed again.
That's a nice job, indeed. It's like the hard drive motor bearing replacement
I mentioned, or another repair I saw on an IBM 1311 drive, where the hydraulic
head actuator sprung a leak. I assume the leak repair involved standard
spares, but the FE dealt with the oil spray by carefully cleaning the heads and
pack. Conveniently I could get high purity (reagent grade) isopropyl alcohol
for that job, from the chemistry department stock room. Worked great, no
problem booting the pack after the repair.
paul
