While I was at DEC in the old San German PR plant, I spent a lot of time in QC, I was originally hired to do board repair and somehow ended up in QC.
One day this box came in, they removed the box and inside was rack with a PDP-11 in it. The whole machine was to test core memory used in the PDP-8e's and the PDP-11's. This thing came with a fanfold that was about 12" thick. It had all of the instructions the code and repair instrucions in it. Along with this was a 2x4 that was about 4ft long. It was affixed to the rear of the cabinet, there was a sign that said "see last page of fanfold". The last page had a set of instruc- tions if the machine failed and on reboot continued to do the same thing. It said "Take 2x4 and whack left side of cabinet at level of PDP-11 console, one good whack should do it". I assumed that in the wire wrap backplane on the test jig, there was some wire wrap issue and rather than dig into that mess and find it they found that the 2x4 was faster and worked. (indeed it did). The test the machine executed printed out a eye pattern overlayed on a grid. You were looking for width of aperture and position of eye in reference to the read signal on the read line. On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 11:30 AM, Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com> wrote: > On Tue, 4 Apr 2017, Chuck Hast wrote: > > > The other one I worked on was the PDP-11, those were interesting times. > > I did not program or administer a PDP-11, but it ran the remote access > terminals (Hollerith card reader and wide line printer) in the Chemistry > building that connected to the IBM S/360s on both U. of Illinois campuses: > Urbana/Champaign and Chicago. > > As part of my graduate program was a course in systems ecology for > which I > wrote a FORTRAN IV program modeling lake energetics. The input card deck > occupied more than one box. At the end of a semester when the CS100/101 > students were trying to complete projects by occupying the remote access > suite if I was in my lab I'd get a call asking me to read in the cards and > start a model run. This took enough main frame resources that it drove away > the undergrads. Then I killed the run so us grad students had access to the > systems. > > Fun and games. My son liked to feed the card reader hopper, push the > buttons to initiate a job, and watch the line printer spit out page after > page of output. > > Rich > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- Chuck Hast -- KP4DJT -- Glass, five thousand years of history and getting better. The only container material that the USDA gives blanket approval on. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
