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These articles are fantastic. When I started at IBM in the early 80s there were plenty of 360s still around, but the new hotness was 370, so all the training co

by beachy 5y ago

These articles are fantastic. When I started at IBM in the early 80s there were plenty of 360s still around, but the new hotness was 370, so all the training courses, installations, management focus were for the new machines. The cool kids went to London, Tokyo and Poughkeepsie for training courses - the rest of us toughed it out fixing these venerable old beasts using oscilloscopes and mountains of manuals. There were no decent helicopter level documentation like Ken's available. Having access to articles like this back then would have been life changing.

hprotagonist 5y ago
> The cool kids went to London, Tokyo and Poughkeepsie for training courses I grew up around the city on that list that ain’t like the others. The idea that “cool kids” would be sent there, on _purpose_, and as some kind of _reward__, just made me laugh and laugh even though i know why it’s true and that it’s not a joke.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Poughkeepsie itself may not be a great place, but the surrounding area is beautiful.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    City government is still dysfunctional.
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
> the rest of us toughed it out fixing these venerable old beasts using oscilloscopes and mountains of manuals. Actually this looks very, very cool to me. It resembles taming mythological beasts . I wish I had the chance to work on such projects.
- beachy 5y ago
  With hindsight it was sure exciting but not really fun. There was huge pressure to get the machine back up again. An outage might mean that an entire bank branch was down, or that payroll could not be run. The CEO could be looking over your shoulder. That kind of pressure saps the fun quickly. Also the bugs could be very, very hard hard to find. In room-sized machines like 3033 for example, there are many thousands of signal leads (trileads) that were many yards long. A slightly bad connection could cause electrical ringing and highly intermittent errors that were excruciatingly difficult to reproduce, let alone to find and fix. Intermittent errors were common and brutal. You could think you'd fixed it, only to have another crash a few hours later. A common debugging technique was to swap cards around and see if the bug moved. Just doing that often introduced new bugs. In latter years the role of the on-site engineer was reduced, and often you would be a lacky for some remote engineer back in the plant where the machine was built.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    Thanks, yeah it does sound suck and no halo at all...I guess the best way is to either transfer to the "cool boy" branch ASAP or get a few years of experience and move to greener places? BTW what did the cool boys do? I guess they became system programmers, admins and such?

by beachy 5y ago

hprotagonist 5y ago

> The cool kids went to London, Tokyo and Poughkeepsie for training courses I grew up around the city on that list that ain’t like the others. The idea that “cool kids” would be sent there, on _purpose_, and as some kind of _reward__, just made me laugh and laugh even though i know why it’s true and that it’s not a joke.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Poughkeepsie itself may not be a great place, but the surrounding area is beautiful.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  City government is still dysfunctional.

hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

> the rest of us toughed it out fixing these venerable old beasts using oscilloscopes and mountains of manuals. Actually this looks very, very cool to me. It resembles taming mythological beasts . I wish I had the chance to work on such projects.

beachy 5y ago
With hindsight it was sure exciting but not really fun. There was huge pressure to get the machine back up again. An outage might mean that an entire bank branch was down, or that payroll could not be run. The CEO could be looking over your shoulder. That kind of pressure saps the fun quickly. Also the bugs could be very, very hard hard to find. In room-sized machines like 3033 for example, there are many thousands of signal leads (trileads) that were many yards long. A slightly bad connection could cause electrical ringing and highly intermittent errors that were excruciatingly difficult to reproduce, let alone to find and fix. Intermittent errors were common and brutal. You could think you'd fixed it, only to have another crash a few hours later. A common debugging technique was to swap cards around and see if the bug moved. Just doing that often introduced new bugs. In latter years the role of the on-site engineer was reduced, and often you would be a lacky for some remote engineer back in the plant where the machine was built.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  Thanks, yeah it does sound suck and no halo at all...I guess the best way is to either transfer to the "cool boy" branch ASAP or get a few years of experience and move to greener places? BTW what did the cool boys do? I guess they became system programmers, admins and such?