[cctalk] Re: Print chain for 1403

On 12/23/24 17:21, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: I don't know if there was a difference, but at our school, when we ordered and later took delivery of a 360/50 (purchased), IBM called up the local Selectric repair guy (his primary duty at the time) and shipped him to school to service our systems.  We had a 360/40 from about 68 till the /50 was delivered in about 1970.  So he had to fix both.  It speaks volumes that a typewrite repairman could move to servicing a system like the 360 with the training provided by IBM. And how good he was at it.  Worth noting that the console, 1052 was always running perfectly. He was our "CE" and I don't think he had any other systems to service. We were in Rolla, Mo about 80 miles from St Louis so not practical to call him up for routine calls. He continued servicing all other IBM products when not working on the /50. The later experience we had we didn't have a term for the IBM personnel.  Our service on a number of IBM systems was much more we fix and IBM come in seldom.  We had a 4381 and a 9221 as well as two 9370s.  We did not have much hardware issues in the way of faults or the like IBM expected us to handle all aspects of configuration and the like as we were supporting an IBM approved third party operating system which required testing in various configurations that our and later their customers would encounter. The system was Ultimate Pick on the mainframe, and ran directly on the hardware, or in our case for development on VM and VM/ESA.  We had it configured to be bootable if need be on both the bare machine as well as under VM for each developer. But when the IBM guys showed up it was typically for larger jobs. For instance we upgraded to the 9221 and they shipped in an upgrade kit and installed it for us. And periodically they'd have to work on our tape drives which were 3420s. thanks Jim