Mike
Just yesterday I was trying to recall which colleagues I had worked with more
than once during my career. One of them I fondly remember was a key
character in a story I file under "The Back Stairs".
The relevance will become apparent.
The salesmen lived - mainly - on the 7th floor (we won't hear about them any
more - well, one), the SEs on the 6th floor and the CEs ("Customer Engineers"
aka FEs in some "geographies") on the 5th floor. I shared a desk with a
salesman - recently an SE[1] - and the SE, Peter, who handled everything to
do with DOS, the old S/360 operating system, to whom I was an understudy.
The desk was located at the back of the open-plan office next to the door to
the back stairs.
Normally all problems requiring fixes to DOS or one of its associated programs
were fed to Peter and he handled them with alacrity. Then came the
reassignment of responsibilities mentioned in the prompting post. It applied
not
only to OS/360 but across the board. I can date this more precisely
than "back in the '60s" to 1968, probably the first half and certainly not the
last quarter.
One day shortly after the announcement, our favourite customer called in with
a problem. Peter took the call but was now obliged to redirect the call to
Dave, the colleague who turned up again in my career, on the floor below.
Peter may have folded his arms but he certainly just sat back with a particular
smile on his face after putting down the handset. We waited. Very soon we
heard the expected steps ascending the stairs.
Gradually the CEs took over "software" responsibility added to their continuing
responsibility for "hardware". This little story describes the rather
inefficient
way the process got started for DOS in one branch office.
Chris Mason
[1] A bit of a digression: this guy had been a ship's architect and knew a bit
about programming. I had a FORTRAN program - something to do with
solenoids - which essentially worked except for a number per iteration which
was intended to confirm that the main calculation was correct. The number
was never quite what it was supposed to be. FORTRAN having the reputation
for being unintelligible, I had made some effort to use expansive and
meaningful variable names. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that this principle
had led me into naming a variable with an initial "i" when it was supposed
*not* to be an integer. My salesman colleague, looking at my code with an
uncluttered mind, spotted my - classic! - mistake.
On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:18:22 -0500, Mike Myers <m...@mentor-
SERVICES.COM> wrote:
>Elardus:
>
>Back in the '60s, the Field Engineering Division took over first-level
>support of OS/360, creating a new kind of Customer Engineer called a
>Program Support Representative (PSR). ...
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