wrote:
On Thu, 15 Sep 2016 10:16:14 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

wrote:
On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:45:32 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:02:07 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

I went to school for 36 weeks to
learn to fix mainframe computer systems for NCR.

Yikes, the longest mainframe school I ever went to was 8 weeks. They
sent you back to the field for a while, then you went back for a more
advanced course. Once you got a feel for the culture of the various
families, (Endicott, Kingston or Rochester) you usually did not need
much additional education to figure that stuff out anyway. If you were
trained on a 168, it wasn't hard to figure out what a 3033 or a 3090
was doing. The Rochester machines were even more so. If you understood
any AS/400, you understood them all. The hardware may have been
different but the maintenance package was the same and they all ran
the same software.
When I moved to Florida I waived training on about 400 boxes because
the technology of virtually all of the "industry systems" (ATMs, Cash
registers, teller terminals etc) was robbed from the UC.5 support
processor we had been using on Endicott mainframes for over a decade.
The rest was just belts, pulleys and wheels. Same with the 3890 check
sorter. It took me a few weeks to get a feel for the ink ****er and
some of the adjustments on the feed but it is just a paper pusher, run
by a 360/25 processor and I was a region specialist on the 25.



The 36 weeks was basic electronics for some weeks, and then the mainframe,
and all the peripherals. They we still discrete transistors back then, and
we learned to fix individual boards.

They used to break our stuff up more than that. You would generally
get the basic school and a few products. Go back and get comfortable
with those and then go back to school for more complex products.
It was a process where you build on prior skills that you have had
practical experience with.


We did that after the first school. On the 315 computer course, you had to
learn the system and peripherals.

I think the education may have been a little different, just because
of the vast numbers of different boxes we built or rebadged.
I was the "Gadget man" for a number of years and had microfilm
equipment (Diazo copiers, cameras, viewers etc), offset printing
presses and optical sheet scanners similar to what they use as voting
machines these days. It made the job more interesting. Actually fixing
cards became a thing of the past once the 360 line got going in the
60s because of the integrated circuits and the inability to actually
get the parts. There were still some boxes out there with SMS cards in
them but by the mid 70s, they were getting pretty rare. By the 80s, I
was looking for something else to do. I was working in Service
planning in Endicott and realized, actually doing much more than
cutting open the box and plugging in the card would be rare.
The new technology was really not going to break and when it did, the
service processor would be calling the card 99.99% of the time.
When I moved to Florida my main job was fixing the process of fixing
thousands of small machines spread out over 5 counties with a minimum
of people at the lowest cost and still maintaining "6 sigma" quality.
By 1990-91 that quality goal started to slip, coincidental with the
"Walmarting of America" and the writing was on the wall for me. By
1993 I had several certifications as an electrical inspector and I was
one of the early license holders in Florida.
(Pretty much all self taught)



Part f the difference, is the amount of boxes. NCR was maybe 5% of the big
systems of IBM. So we had to be more jack of all boxes in our offices.
IC's were in the future in 1964. We still had a rebadged, I think CDC,
tube octal based box. The first IC box I worked on was a controller
between an optical character reader and a tape drive. Before e Point Of
Sale terminals, the cash registers used an optical font that the scanner
could read. I could see the FE jobs being reduced in training in the
future. So I worked on my engineering degree. The NCR 315 was a 12 bit
machine, and later was almost the same architecture, converted to an 8 bit
character, 4 board set, that we called the 605 minicontroller. Send in an
FE and 4 boards and 99% of the time he could fix the problem. Did not take
anywhere as much training. I think the FE's trained from 1960 to 1965 were
the best trained service people as a group the world will ever see.