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On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:26:26 -0800, "Calif Bill"
wrote:


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On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:03:40 -0800, "Calif Bill"
wrote:

I was an NCR guy. Our own drives. We replaced a 360 ,mod 20 at Macys
with
an NCR 315 system. The Mod 20 had paper tape and card input and printer
output. No mag files. Just an expensive Tab system.


Were they hydraulic too or had you migrated to the voice coil system
by then?
I know some companies just rebadged our drives (Control Data springs
to mind)
If you were around mod 20s you know what MFCM really means ;-)

They were voice coils. We did not go hydraulic for a couple years. We
actually designed one of first disk drives. Our idiot leaders went into a
joint venture with CDC and they took the disk drives and we took printers.
Bad deal from all the FE's view point. We saw disk drives to be the
better
product line in the future. Later when I left NCR, I went to Itel and
worked on the channel diagnostics for our Siemens clone of the IBM 3800
printer. We used a DEC 11/34 as the channel controller to the printer and
since we had to run IBM diags cleanly, I disassembled the code and found
the
hidden channel codes that were sent and what was expected back. Still
probably the most fun job I had. Great people in the team and great
company
to work for. We connected to a 33xx clone from Hitachi.

IBM started with hydraulics in disk drives(305 through 2314) and in
high speed printers (1403), then changed to the voice coil disk drive
(33xx and up) and servo or stepper motor printers (3211 and beyond).
I spent a lot of time with 3800s in the 80s. We had 35 of them in my
office and over 70 in the DC metro area. It was pretty much where I
spent most of my time. By then CPUs were not really breaking and we
didn't have any check sorters.
Back in the days when CPUs broke I had a chance to work with Itel
guys.
I worked midnights and nobody was around to enforce the rules about
not assisting if a 3d party was present. I remember one of those "6
vendor" nights tracking down a channel bug with the Itel guy stepping
microcode on his AS/5 and me shadowing him on my 3158. If there was
ever a chance for them to say they didn't steal our stuff it went away
that night. We were just calling out stop words back and forth with
each of us alternating which one we looked up. The I/O vendors were
acknowledging they got that far. We ended up nailing the T-bar switch
guy to the wall.

My move to Florida changed all of that. We had the C&S data center
here in Ft Myers. 3800s and 3890s.
This was a resident territory so we worked on everything here and I
really had the most fun with point of sale stuff. Wendys ended up
rolling out their new PC based registers in Naples because they liked
our operation (I had also worked on the Burger King rollout).
We invented the hot swap procedure for printers on the old 3684
systems in my shop and had the only field rebuild program in the
country. A 3684 was my first woodie, before I started making wood case
PCs. We had a clone of a Wendy's store in our shop to test things. (2
registers). I even got to meet Dave on rollout night. Wendys gave me
one of the new registers to play with in the shop.
\

Fun days. NCR paid for part of my university tuition with a tuition refund
plan. About 50% total as they did not cover books. And state university
tuition was between $125 and $250 a semester. I worked on the NCR 315 and
Century systems and the 420 Optical scanner. That scanner pretty much paid
for my house. After my degree, I was the liaison to Montgomery Wards in the
west. Still took care of the scanner as there were 2 of in the US who could
really fix the machine. Me and a guy in Chicago. But I decided where the
problems were with the POS systems. Store, Data Center, or in between.
Finally got fed up with the service manager in San Francisco with his BS and
took a huge raise to go to Itel. Then the H systems killed us and the
residual value of our leases and they laid off 2300 of us. Went to several
startups over the years. Screwed up in Feb 1980. Took a job in designing
disk drive controllers for DEC systems supplier company and turned down the
same salary 1.5 hours later for Rolm Corp. As I had already agreed to the
first job. I figure that 1.5 hours cost me $100,000,000. Neighbor went
from Rolm to another startup in the comm industry and then to Cisco as the
VP. He cashed out $240 million after taxes.