Here's one for the DEC engineers

Jerome Fine replies: Was high voltage a problem working inside a VAX cluster? If not, then from what I have heard, that may have been a demotion. I was told that while working on an 11/34A, one fellow from DEC Field Circus blew all the boards in the backplane when he removed the memory - seems that he forgot to turn off the power!! I realize that most DEC techs were not as clueless as this example (since even I know that the power must be turn off - and I have rarely forgotten to do so - haha), but it might be best to not assume what all your fellows were able to do - or at least management thought they could do. This I do agree with - although I can't vouch for the IBM side. I often complained about the tension on an IBM 029 keypunch. I was in the habit of holding either one card drum or the other to either remove or insert an extra character in the card - remember when we used to program with a card deck that took 24 hours to be returned? If the tension was correct, it could be done with either drum. On occasion when I complained, the tech refused to accept my assertion that it could be done and therefore that removing or inserting a character was a valid test. Naturally, since the tech knew more than I did, he sometimes refused to "fix" the key punch. At that point, depending on how desperate I was (if there was another keypunch around), I just went along or "insisted" that the tension on the key punch be brought up to "normal" specifications. I could never understand why a tech would insist that the tension was OK when it obviously was not just because I wanted to do something non-standard 0.01% of the time (which would obviously not hurt the keypunch if done so rarely), especially when 99% of all keypunches could do that operation since almost all had the tension set correctly. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine