[COFF] 52-pin D-Sub?

[William Pechter]

The John McNamara book still seems to be around.  Great reading. 

I worked for DEC in Monmouth and Mercer counties and one night stole all the Vax 11/780 kits from DEC Holmdel.  Boy were they pissed.  However,  I had a critical outage at the FBI at Fort Monmouth with two hour response so I didn't drive an hour to my Princeton office. 8-)

I had Holmel's keys and alarm codes so I left them an IOU and headed to the site.  Holmdel was 15 minutes from the site but their techs were dedicated to telco only...  So their parts took a trip. 

The DEC folks at the labs and AT&T sites were treated like royalty compared with us regular commercial business groups.  They had the best training... newest machines...  If they found a pdp8 or 11/23 and had repair issues - - they had us called.  We saw more wierd like the Vax 11/782 that couldn't back up because it was sold without enough memory in the main (or attached cpu) to run standalone backup.  

I had to go in on Saturday to move a memory board between CPUs.  I think Field Service donated a board to RCA Semi finally.  That was a dumb machine design. 

I spent years with a lot of computer companies and RS232 interfaces were easy as long as there was only one vendor.  If you see how Pr1me or Hewlett Packard dealt with the serial ports... I used to be the guy who at the most desperate would get Kermit over a 3 wire interface to allow data transfer between different systems.  Or UUCP on ms-dos... 

Something about jack of all trades. 

Bill

Sent from pechter at gmail.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff at tuhs.org>
Sent: Fri, 28 Feb 2020 17:21
Subject: Re: [COFF] 52-pin D-Sub?

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 4:58 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

>
> Sure, but then DEC Field Circus won't touch the box.
>
That's not true.  All our UNIX systems at UCB and CMU had DEC field service
on them and we had lots of non-DEC HW, including memory, disk and disk
controllers.   Funny, the DEC knew we could swap memory chips on the
National Semiconductor memory board for the Vax.  Which we could not do
with the DEC boards, they had to be swapped.

The same was true at BTL, in fact and at Bell, there were DEC folks
on-site.  They might occasionally gripe, but we used to joke about it.  It
probably helped in all these places we had more than multiple systems and
the field offices knew better.  If we called, it was busted.



>
> Heh heh :-)  I don't think I've ever seen RS-232 used "properly" i.e.
> implementing DSR/DTR or RTS/CTS for other than flow control etc, and using
> the secondary pins as well.

Maybe you never saw a serial RJE station or I suspect a  serial line that
was fully synchronous running one of the IBM protocols.  That was sort of
where I started to learn in the late 1960s.  I saw IBM systems before I saw
the DEC ones and IBM used all the wires.  Eventually, I got a copy of the
wonderful DEC press book from John McNamara, called "Technical Aspects of
Data Communications."

Then I learned about UNIX, which came from AT&T which used all that stuff
in their modems and data communications gear.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20200228/3b282578/attachment-0001.html>