chasfm11 wrote:
The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.
In a similar vein, DBAs, server admins and application support all have their own stories and finger pointing. I've lost count of the number of times there's been an application issue and the first to blame is the database, especially if it's a third party vendor app because they are infallible, just ask them.
I had an old HP Mini computer that had 3 400 meg disc packs on it. Each one was almost the size of a washing machine. Well for some reason every semester when the COBOL class started doing KSAM and VTAM sorts I had one disc pack that would set up enough vibrations that it would walk across the floor. There was a significant East Indian population among the TA's I used for lab support. One time I come walking through the lab and I see one of the guys sitting on the disc pack and it jumping around. I asked him what he thought he was doing and he explained the problem with the KSAM sorts. He then said they couldn't figure out how to stop it so they had just taken to having one of the guys sit on the disc pack when the students were doing KSAM sorts. I just shook my head and said ok and walked away.
Syntyr
"Wherever you go... There you are." - Buckaroo Banzai
"Inconceivable!" - Fizzinni
chasfm11 wrote:
The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.
In a similar vein, DBAs, server admins and application support all have their own stories and finger pointing. I've lost count of the number of times there's been an application issue and the first to blame is the database, especially if it's a third party vendor app because they are infallible, just ask them.
I had an old HP Mini computer that had 3 400 meg disc packs on it. Each one was almost the size of a washing machine. Well for some reason every semester when the COBOL class started doing KSAM and VTAM sorts I had one disc pack that would set up enough vibrations that it would walk across the floor. There was a significant East Indian population among the TA's I used for lab support. One time I come walking through the lab and I see one of the guys sitting on the disc pack and it jumping around. I asked him what he thought he was doing and he explained the problem with the KSAM sorts. He then said they couldn't figure out how to stop it so they had just taken to having one of the guys sit on the disc pack when the students were doing KSAM sorts. I just shook my head and said ok and walked away.
Those old disk packs were known for "HDI" (head-disk interference). It didn't take much pressure physical pressure in the wrong spot to start that eerie whining sound that marked the certain departure of any data on the pack. I'm really surprised that sitting on it didn't produce that result at some point. You were much better off to just let it shake the way it wanted to. Even the self-contained ones (heads mounted in the pack instead of in an arm inside the machine) could be pretty easily convinced to self destruct.
chasfm11 wrote:
The fun part is that no matter which perspective that you have (end user, help desk, secondary support), there seem to be enough stories to tell about the other help desk functions.
In a similar vein, DBAs, server admins and application support all have their own stories and finger pointing. I've lost count of the number of times there's been an application issue and the first to blame is the database, especially if it's a third party vendor app because they are infallible, just ask them.
I had an old HP Mini computer that had 3 400 meg disc packs on it. Each one was almost the size of a washing machine. Well for some reason every semester when the COBOL class started doing KSAM and VTAM sorts I had one disc pack that would set up enough vibrations that it would walk across the floor. There was a significant East Indian population among the TA's I used for lab support. One time I come walking through the lab and I see one of the guys sitting on the disc pack and it jumping around. I asked him what he thought he was doing and he explained the problem with the KSAM sorts. He then said they couldn't figure out how to stop it so they had just taken to having one of the guys sit on the disc pack when the students were doing KSAM sorts. I just shook my head and said ok and walked away.
Those old disk packs were known for "HDI" (head-disk interference). It didn't take much pressure physical pressure in the wrong spot to start that eerie whining sound that marked the certain departure of any data on the pack. I'm really surprised that sitting on it didn't produce that result at some point. You were much better off to just let it shake the way it wanted to. Even the self-contained ones (heads mounted in the pack instead of in an arm inside the machine) could be pretty easily convinced to self destruct.
Holy Smoke, you guys must be OLD!
When I moved to IT at my work place, we were still running an old Digital PDP 1145 I wish I'd kept a platter array out of the disk drives. They were DEC if I remember correctly. About the size of a washing machine and held a whopping 80 MB of data. They had 5 platters and 20 read/write heads.
I kept a 64K card of core memory when we finally hauled it to the junkyard. My sister had it framed for me and it hangs in my office today.
Last edited by BigGuy on Wed Aug 29, 2012 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
One of my first machines to service was a 1401. A big one of these was twice the size of a chest freezer and, if it had a special feature, it had 16K of RAM. Otherwise, it was limited to 8K. It read and punched cards, printed on paper and would do at least a 6 reel tape sort - assuming that you gave it enough time. It used Autocoder language. I suspect noone else here knows what a "Gmwm" was.
My expertise was in in 370 mainframes. I never cut the water lines in one as described in another post but I moved, upgraded and diagnosed a bunch of those. I could drive a JES/3 console better than any of the customer's operators. And at that point, I could add hex in my head as well as I could decimal.
Syntyr wrote:They were seperated in side by side raised floor rooms. The doors all had combination key locks on them. Well the IBM engineer was there and waiting on the physical plant guys to come in to shut the water down and start removing the old 370. Well he thought he would help the process along and start breaking down the connections. So he drops the gates on the 4" incoming water line and proceeds to bust the connection. Well not being a physical plant guy he didn't stop to verify that the water flow had ceased and pressure was removed from the system. So when he wrenched over the connection gallons and gallons of water started spraying in in to the room directly beneath the raised flooring headed directly to the currently in operation 390. So he ran to the door and started beating on the window to try to get all of the computer center techs out of the room before they got electrocuted or a fire started. About that time the water hit the electric mains and pops the breakers and shut the whole facility down.
Lots of lessons were learned by many people that day... Never saw that engineer again although I understand he was still working for IBM...
IBM doesn't fire, they retrain.
I left the terminal room one time, and wound up locked out with my keys and badge on the other side of the door. Supposed to be secure because all kinds of special circuits ran through it (Lottery, other important stuff) and since I had one of the few keys, I would have to call someone from outside the building to come let me in. Then I had a brainstorm, the entire center was built on raised floors, and I knew it was open right straight through because I had run all of the cables in the center (including using a radio controlled car to pull in pull strings for me. So I popped a couple of floor tiles, got under the floor and belly crawled under the terminal room and got back in. After I pointed it out to my boss, they went back in and sealed off the terminal room, and the boss' office, which I had crawled under.
Syntyr wrote:They were seperated in side by side raised floor rooms. The doors all had combination key locks on them. Well the IBM engineer was there and waiting on the physical plant guys to come in to shut the water down and start removing the old 370. Well he thought he would help the process along and start breaking down the connections. So he drops the gates on the 4" incoming water line and proceeds to bust the connection. Well not being a physical plant guy he didn't stop to verify that the water flow had ceased and pressure was removed from the system. So when he wrenched over the connection gallons and gallons of water started spraying in in to the room directly beneath the raised flooring headed directly to the currently in operation 390. So he ran to the door and started beating on the window to try to get all of the computer center techs out of the room before they got electrocuted or a fire started. About that time the water hit the electric mains and pops the breakers and shut the whole facility down.
Lots of lessons were learned by many people that day... Never saw that engineer again although I understand he was still working for IBM...
IBM didn't fire, they retrained. Since 1993, they've constantly fired and then hired different people, mostly overseas. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... t-of-a-job" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I left the terminal room one time, and wound up locked out with my keys and badge on the other side of the door. Supposed to be secure because all kinds of special circuits ran through it (Lottery, other important stuff) and since I had one of the few keys, I would have to call someone from outside the building to come let me in. Then I had a brainstorm, the entire center was built on raised floors, and I knew it was open right straight through because I had run all of the cables in the center (including using a radio controlled car to pull in pull strings for me. So I popped a couple of floor tiles, got under the floor and belly crawled under the terminal room and got back in. After I pointed it out to my boss, they went back in and sealed off the terminal room, and the boss' office, which I had crawled under.
I was skinny and spry in those days.
I fixed it for you.
There were raised floors and then there were raised floors. The ones at the phone company were death traps. If someone left a tile out and you stepped in the hole, you were going down far enough and hard enough to break something. We hid all kinds of things under there in the office area. In other places, we could barely get the cables underneath and they would have called you "Houdini" if you crawled under those.
One of our guys at the phone company was really short. We kept threatening him that the next time we had to pull cables, we were going to tie them to his back and make him run over to the exit hole. He wasn't amused.
Syntyr wrote:They were seperated in side by side raised floor rooms. The doors all had combination key locks on them. Well the IBM engineer was there and waiting on the physical plant guys to come in to shut the water down and start removing the old 370. Well he thought he would help the process along and start breaking down the connections. So he drops the gates on the 4" incoming water line and proceeds to bust the connection. Well not being a physical plant guy he didn't stop to verify that the water flow had ceased and pressure was removed from the system. So when he wrenched over the connection gallons and gallons of water started spraying in in to the room directly beneath the raised flooring headed directly to the currently in operation 390. So he ran to the door and started beating on the window to try to get all of the computer center techs out of the room before they got electrocuted or a fire started. About that time the water hit the electric mains and pops the breakers and shut the whole facility down.
Lots of lessons were learned by many people that day... Never saw that engineer again although I understand he was still working for IBM...
IBM didn't fire, they retrained. Since 1993, they've constantly fired and then hired different people, mostly overseas. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... t-of-a-job" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I left the terminal room one time, and wound up locked out with my keys and badge on the other side of the door. Supposed to be secure because all kinds of special circuits ran through it (Lottery, other important stuff) and since I had one of the few keys, I would have to call someone from outside the building to come let me in. Then I had a brainstorm, the entire center was built on raised floors, and I knew it was open right straight through because I had run all of the cables in the center (including using a radio controlled car to pull in pull strings for me. So I popped a couple of floor tiles, got under the floor and belly crawled under the terminal room and got back in. After I pointed it out to my boss, they went back in and sealed off the terminal room, and the boss' office, which I had crawled under.
I was skinny and spry in those days.
I fixed it for you.
There were raised floors and then there were raised floors. The ones at the phone company were death traps. If someone left a tile out and you stepped in the hole, you were going down far enough and hard enough to break something. We hid all kinds of things under there in the office area. In other places, we could barely get the cables underneath and they would have called you "Houdini" if you crawled under those.
One of our guys at the phone company was really short. We kept threatening him that the next time we had to pull cables, we were going to tie them to his back and make him run over to the exit hole. He wasn't amused.
I stores spared stuff under the raised floors too.
We had an intermittent trouble at one of the Lottery computer centers and their techs swore it was my circuits. I went up there and "observed" (being management by then I wasn't allowed to use tools) and when it finally happened I noticed that it happened when someone rolled a chair across one part of the raised floor. Just a short burst of noise on the line, but it ruined a longer message which had to be resent.
I had them pull up the floor and found that the computer center techs had run out of round serial cables and had substituted a flat cable, and the flat cable had slipped partly under a loose support for the raised floor. Any time someone crossed that section of floor, it noised up the circuit. That area was not convenient to walk in, but you could roll a chair under that edge of the counter and bang that stanchion down on the cable.
I remember when Google took their phone support offline and replaced it with a recording during the Nexus 7 mislaunch.
I believe the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the personal lives of strangers and those who do not.
