9 Jun
2006
9 Jun
'06
3:58 a.m.
Tony Duell answered:
What you're possibly missing here is that people like me choose a product
_because of the availability of scheamtics and repair parts_. I actually
tracked down and bought a genuine Teac floppy drive for this PC becasue I
could get a service manual for it. Said drive cost over 10 times as much
as a non-name, no-docs drive from the local PC shop.
So, when you stopped supplying schematics, you may well have lost the odd
customer. Not many, and it probably was a sensible business decision, but
maybe the odd one.
And alas I learnt a long time ago that unless it was obvious that
schematics/service manuals were available, thenn they weren't. There was
no point in phoning up the so-called technical support for them. All I'd
get would be insults that I couldn't possibly repair the unit.
However, the operation of a scanner is not too
complex to reverse=20
engineer.=20
Rather you than me. The only scanner I looked inside had several
unindentifyable ICs...=20
I guess that we still can't get you to accept
one, even for free, =
without=20
open hardware source.=20
Surely you all
know me by now. I am not going to depend on something =
that I
can't repair.=20
Tony
---------------------------------------
Billy:
I'm still glassy eyed about this statement. So I thought I would tell =
you a
little about some work I did in the past. In OKCity, I was responsible =
for
all the customer support documentation on the MPI floppies, cartridge =
and
fixed disk drives. In the early 80's I had to do a study and recommend =
ways
to reduce costs - publications had become a huge cost empire within
Engineering. And whole product families were being delayed while the
elaborate manuals were written and prepared. Customers were complaining
about the enormous cost of maintenance.
So I sample polled the largest customers for our drives. It was a =
couple of
hundred out of 2500+. At that time, the only ones who replied that they
needed schematics were a couple of repair services. We asked on theory =
of
operation, app notes, etc. Same thing. None of the customers paying =
the
bills used any of the elaborate documentation except for the interface
specs. At that time two other trends were starting. First,
most products no =
longer
needed card cages. ICs allowed all the logic of a drive to be on one =
PCB.
And we certainly did not want end users mucking up those boards by =
trying to
I have never (well, not in the last 20 years, anyhow) 'mucked up a PCB'
trying to repair it. Yes, you can generally tell where I've been (hand
soldering does look different from wave soldering), but I do not lift
traces, rip out vias, and all the other things that certain people manage
to do.
repair them. (Also, many of the circuits were tuned
in PCB fab; =
swapping
out an IC wouldn't always fix the problem. It had to be tuned to be
optimum.)
That's why I'd want a service manual, not just a schematic.
As an aside, this is a real headache for me when I try to write the
service docs for some ancient, undocumented, computer product. Most
manufactueres used select-on-test resistors rather than presets (there
are good engineering reasons for this, I'll agree), it's not always
obvious that a resistor was selected. And often I only have one example
of the unit to look at. And of course even knowning something was
selected doesn't necessarily make it easy to work out what you have to do
to select it.
The
customer did not demand it, wasn't willing to pay for it. With ASICs =
and
single board drives, we didn't want them to repair the units. The =
No, you'd rather sell them a replacement drive than have them replace
some $1 component (I've seen a Wren, there's a lot that can be
field-repaired on one, expecially given a schematic).
Since that time, more than 20 years, Tony Duell is the
only person I've =
met
who insists on repairing his personal work system to the component =
level.
Everyone else, wants it to be cheap and reliable. And that includes the
most fanatical military buyer.
I want it to be relable 20+ years into the future. That means I have to
be able to repair it. I'd rather not, but I know I will.
I understand Tony's feelings - I've
encountered similar viewpoints many
times in other fields. But it makes me sad, because he can't share a =
lot of
the fun with us. We can't send him scanned manuals and he can't send us
FWIW< I am not totally averse to using internet cafes if I have to. I
have been known to pop into such a place to read a scanned manual, then
make notes from it.
some of the work he has done. And what about photos
from our =
As I mentioned a few weeks back, a friend at HPCC has scanned many of my
hand-drawn diagrams and sells the on a CD-ROM. The money does not go to
me, it supports HOCC. And all I got for mentioning this was a flame that
(a) I'd used the wrong file format (no I haven't, I didn't pick a file
format at all, the one used is convenient for said friend) and (b) I
didn't send it out for nothing.
So I'll make a genuine offer. I will arrange to have all my hand-drawn
schematics put onto CD-ROM in whatever format you choose, And I'll send
it to you free of charge. In return, 'all' I ask for is copies of every
manual on Bitsavers that applies to a machine that I own, in a format
that I prefer, namely printed paper. If you're not willing to spend weeks
printing out this stuff, then you'll have to accept my stuff in whatever
format I consider convenient (just as I have to accept stuff from
Bitsavers, etc, in the format that the site author considered
convenient/reasonable).
conventions,
To me, photos will always be soemthing that uses silver-based imaging.
videos of the speakers, software that is on CDs not
floppies? The =
And I'll take videos on EIAJ spools, N1500 cassettes, V2000 cassetes, and
even, I guess, Betamax. At a pinch I'll take VHS (but it's a horrible
format).
Very little original software for my classics came on CD-ROM. Anyway, I
do have a CD-ROM drive. It's an ancient Philips, actually a modified (by
Philips) audio CD player. And yes I do have the manufacturers service
manual for it.
exchange
of knowledge that bonds the rest of us is lost with Tony. And he has =
lots
of knowledge that we would enjoy seeing.
I gtuess we'll have to rely on text to exchange information. It's worked
for many hundreds of years, after all.
-tony