USR quad modems... (ontopic - really!)

Don <THX1138 at dakotacom.net> wrote: TIP: An embroidery hook works wonders for fishing wirewrap wires out of a nest without too much damage! ;-) (but you have to find the right size hook to ensure a "good grab" on the wire) For those of us who go back to the dawn, there was the spring hook, a beautifully functional tool used on the relay machines. They worked great on the thick wire mats. I still have all of mine and even today find the spring hook to be one of the most useful tools around the shop. Another tool I found useful was a jewelers device to hold rings for soldering. It looks like a pair of tweezers with the ends bent out so they can't touch. You squeeze it, stick it in the wire mat, and release. The tension holds the wires apart. We made a bunch of copies using piano wire and put shrink tubing over the ends. If you get a chance, look at the 6600 or 7600 in the Museum. Seymour loved those dense wire mats - he used wire lengths to tune his systems. If you worked on one of his machines, you spent a significant part of your working hours buried in wire up to your forearms. The worst was the Cyber 170 machines. They were twisted pair 30 gauge wire mats. If you weren't careful, the pins bent and touched. And there was what we called "tingles". The broken piece off the end of a wire would disappear into the wire mat and eventually short two pins out. Even more fun, if you were tuning clocks, the power was on, so you could watch the path of the tingle by the little sparks. Always happened on a Friday night, of course. One of the worst nightmares I worked on was a machine that the engineers working on, had set their coffee cups on top of the cabinet and forgot about them. This was before the styrofoam cups, just waxed paper. It soaked through and dumped the coffee down into the wire mat. We tried for a few days to fix it but finally had to scrap the entire chassis. Per the Peter Principle, the chief suspect was later promoted to be my manager. Billy