PS: I also remember those huge magnetic disks and the machines in which
they operated. About half the size of today's refrigerator/freezers which
stood about waist high. Heaven forbid, should anyone jar the floor on
which they stood resulting in a crashed head. The bearings were air, yes,
microns above the valued disk. How about the HP-9845 "computers"? Those
were the cat's meow in their day. And I started my career using slide
rules. Oh my,........now I'm going back to the Precambrian era........
And the first use of the PET PC in our design group - we had only one for
12 engineers? It was barely powerful enough to determine if all the piece
parts in a given functional circuit design could fit on the real estate
challenged board. Not even powerful enough for any simple circuit
simulations.........
Again, thank you for taking me back to my "fossil-in-the-making" days ! ! !
! Good memories!!!!! ????
Dave - W?LEV
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 5:46 PM David Eckhardt via groups.io <davearea51a=
[email protected]> wrote:
Larry, you sure bring back memories!!!! While I was on the R&D, design,
and prototype end of things, we went through very similar 'exercises'. And
I venture a theory, time will tell if it hasn't already done so, that we
worked during the best of times in the electronic and technical
industries. Yes, troubleshooting to the part level sure taught us about
everything we needed to know about any circuit in existance or could be
imagined! In home brewing at present, if I don't have the required value
of something, the first thing I consider before hitting the Digikey site is
what do I have that can be seriesed or paralleled to yield the value I
need. Good tools to cultivate! In my experience over the last decade of
working, I found the newbies can't even tackle Ohm's Law, DC, don't even
mention complex sources or loads....... True: the
newbies have no clue, what-so-ever.
Thank you for taking me back to my 'fossil-in-the-making' days. Now
retired at 74 and value everything I learned in the process.
Dave - W?LEV
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 4:57 PM Larry Macionski via groups.io <am_fm_radio=
[email protected]> wrote:
Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns
where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of
the
Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")
Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you
did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the
scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even
on
disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable
platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator,
you
could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair
simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had
17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque
wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The
operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line
loading
that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8
before
calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss,
immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They
called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set
of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I
spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch
cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the
heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing
absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives
back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea,
about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block
lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering
iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.
So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was
bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you
could
connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...
I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in
Old
Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted
0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad?
Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to
his
hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the
gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic
parts
store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or
tripled the bill..
Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the
customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away
society.
So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at
other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace
them.
--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*
--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*
