11–20 of 43 posts
Thanks for doing this!
Did they have much of a network or reference to lean on when novel problems would come up, or was it more of a "figure out a way to make it work" way of troubleshooting?
I'd very much like the two gentlemen to sit down and write a memoir about their mainframe days. The older technologies are particularly fascinating. It doesn't have to be a book, but if it is then they can crowd fund.
Might be too late but would love to hear some stories of things they had to do because of space/speed constraints (storage, RAM, registers, CPU, etc.) Edit to add: we are very, very spoiled in todays computing age as far as constraints goes
I worked as a field engineer on Honeywell mainframes in the late 1970s and later moved into programming so I'm always keen on hearing about the good old days when computers looked impressive. I'd be interested in hearing about their most challenging debugging problems. I'd also like to hear about how your grandfather serviced core memories back in the day. Honeywell core memories had spare bits built in which made is…
I'm curious in regards to repairs (and perhaps this is just stupidity on my part): Were spare parts for repairs kept on-site, did they have to be ordered/shipped, or did your grandfather have a, er, service truck with parts, etc?
For larger clients (like the K Mart stores) we had private pilots on call that could be sent to another city to get a ~$500 part. Especially during holiday shopping season. Some clients had onsite spares but that wasn’t very common. They relied on IBM service to just handle everything. For some customers we had a 2 hour on-site SLA.