From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.hesk...@verizon.net>
Sent: Thursday, 2009/December/17 21:21
My impression of the (DEC) 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.
Gene, it's HP 2100S computers that I know. And I was able to accurately
diagnose at least one problem before the substitute tech figured it out.
He looked at me with "a strange expression on his face." The usual guy
had not prepared him. The usual fellow and I had a good rapport. I learned
to describe problems well enough he could diagnose them quickly and fix
them. (Aside from the digital tape drives in those old 8500 consoles the
basic setup was quite reliable. Even the Versatec wet printers did their
job very well on simple routine maintenance.)
I have experience on DEC PDP-11 machines and VAXen. But it's limited.
Now, if you want to "get me rolling" about an incompetent computer
company just mention GRiD and their Compass not really a laptop computer.
Even the bugs were themselves buggy. (We had to own 6 of them to keep 5
running most of the time. The displays went out regularly. And the OS
would lock up at peculiar times "just because it felt like it" when
trying to talk to an HPIB device. (It had built in HPIB to talk to its
disk drive etc.) Wikipiddle accuses it of being a laptop. All I can do
is snicker about that assertion. Then they continue the phrase to call
it a computer. Admittedly it was, on brief occasions, a computer. But
it spent too much time emulating a doorstop to be worthy of its price.
{^_^}
