On Thursday 17 December 2009, R-Elists wrote: >> The absolute, without a doubt, biggest POS I ever had to live >> with was an >> 11/23 that had more hdwe bugs than all issues of windows >> combined since DOS5.0. Dec field engineers changed every >> piece in that thing except the frame rail with the serial >> number and all they managed to do was convert a daily crash >> into an every 10 minute crash. > ><snip> > >> -- >> Cheers, Gene > >wow, Gene, that is a bummer, sincerely sorry to hear about that episode... > >i was just a wee tiny lad when you (cough) more experienced folks were > using tin cans & string... > We were just a slight more advanced than that. I went to Kalifornia to make my million and didn't, but that's another story. While there in '60 I got to work for several months as a bench tech for an outfit building the first pair of the then smallest tv cameras in the world. B&W of course, 2.5" in diameter & about a foot long out of the case. We had the breadboard working fairly well but it was ugly as sin with parts flying out of it nearly everywhere. About 10 minutes after I arrived one morning the front door opened up and a couple of civilians plus about 6 copies of some navy folks with silver & gold on their shoulders walked in. Wanted to see it work. In the dark. So as it was showing a good pix of the shop area on a monitor, Joe picked it up, cleared one side of one of the benches drawers out, set it in gently and closed the drawer on the coax cable that was both video and power supply. 3 seconds later the auto target finally got there and a very nice pix of the wood grain of the drawers plywood back was showing on the monitor, slightly out of focus. Joe offered to trim the focus but the silvered gent said it won't be necessary, but do you have an office with a few chairs so we can talk. Later I found out that one of those civies was Jacques Cousteau, who was one of the 2 guys in that 6 foot pressure ball in Feb '61 when that dive was made.
We did, and 3 hours later had a contract to put those two cameras on the Trieste as soon as we could get the pressure cases built. Those were headed for the bottom of the Challenger Deep, 37,000+ feet in the big pond. Short story, we did, and they worked. And don't let anyone tell you water is not compressible. The Trieste ran on big banks of sears die hard batteries and were not protected from the pressure. Each cell had a small extension neck screwed into it, and a small balloon with about a cup of battery acid in it was snapped on. A wire cage kept the balloons from being carried too far by the currents. One of the pix they brought back showed one rack of batteries, with the balloons either out of sight or only about 1/4" high above the neck, the squeeze of 17,000 psi was on. The batteries didn't care, they Just Worked(TM). >;-> > >did 11/23 meant it was 23 months off the engineering board? > At this late date, I haven't a clue exactly what the 11/23 meant. That was a weird beastie, the app was written in pascal, and it was recompiled at boot time. So they could call it up, upload a new version of the app, and reboot it as they were logging out. The reboot of course took several minutes, so they had to choose a time when the schedule was empty for an hour or more when they did that. We had a vt-220 that stayed logged in all the time so we could make emergency schedule changes, but that turned out to be no job at all, and when it was the vt-220 that failed, the HOT went up in smoke, was when I re-wrote the vt-100 proggy we had for the coco3, and turned it into a vt-220. That was fairly easy cuz the only real change in the protocol was the esc sequence, it became a full 8 bit byte but 99% of the rest of it was identical. >i dont recall ever having an issue with DEC stuff yet maybe that was > because they had pocket burns up to the elbow on their arms ? My impression of the field engineers knowledge was that it was nil, other than the rote stuff, DEC had taught him. And I suspect Joanne would back me up on that. Those guys couldn't replace a stuck output cuz it had an open collector in a 7406 with a gun to their head, no idea how to troubleshoot to the critters part level with a good scope, and little or no idea which end of a soldering iron got hot. He drug out a wood burning kit from ungar once to do something and I unplugged it 3 times before he got the message that he wasn't going to use that piece of blow every chip in the building crap on my watch. I went and got my bench iron, a fairly fancy, grounded tip, variable temp controlled iron and a roll of silver bearing solder and did it my self. And he was surprised as all get out when a pair of 5" curved nose suture clamps came off my T-shirt collar and grabbed that stuff about 10x tighter than he would ever get with his worn out radio shack special long noses. Ditto the pair of 4" flush cut diagonals I used to clean up the surplus leads on the other side of the board. Not to mention the alky and q-tips used to clean up after myself. He/they had just enough knowledge to be dangerous. > - rh > -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
