> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts Once upon a time I worked as a (young) field engineer looking after mostly Intel based k

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts Once upon a time I worked as a (young) field engineer looking after mostly Intel based kit, peripherals and Novell/Windows/Unix OS support. Our company was subcontracted to look after a bunch of Perle controllers for another maintenance company that didn't have engineering staff locally (these were on two and four hour onsite must-fix contracts). Perle manufactured a range of clones of IBM's 5294/5394/5494 Twinax remote access controllers that you plugged stuff like 5250 series terminals and printers into. Anyway, I had to go on a training to course to learn about the gear, usual faults etc. But I also had to learn the IBM lingo such as asking the remote ops folks to "VARY ON" and "VARY OFF" (i.e. enable/disable) controllers when working on them. There were other, now long forgotten, incantations you needed to utter over the phone to IBM ops folks when on site, but the VARY ON/OFF one stuck with me. As an aside, I also ended up looking after and field repairing a bunch of System/36's[0], in particular replacing hard disks which looked like: http://www.corestore.org/5360-13.jpg http://www.corestore.org/5360-13.jpg Amazingly a sole engineer could carry out this task in about 30-40 minutes with no need for extra hands. These were well thought out and designed workhorses. [0]: http://www.corestore.org/36.htm http://www.corestore.org/36.htm