The New Arrival

April, 1995

I will let others on these pages debate the Theology of What to buy. Let us presume that you have made your choice. Then what...

10 years ago in the Bay Area, there were weekly events called Computer Fairs. Small vendors from all over would set up booths in some armory or gymnasium, and sell computer parts. Generally these were new parts, and generally, the sellers were actual computer retailers in their day jobs. A person could buy a case here, a power supply there, a mother board, a bios chip, memory, etc etc and walk home with an armload of parts that, when plugged together, created an instant (and very cheap) computer.

Now there are companies, large and small, that can do this assembly so cheap that there is no point really to rolling your own any more. When your new computer is delivered, it is not only filled with electronic stuff, but with the software to start it all up. A year and a half ago, I bought my present home system, and I have yet to crack the case and peek inside. I plugged it in, and it started working.

When I started working for World Wide Widgets a quarter century ago, a whole floor of a very large building was devoted to the computer centers of the various subsidiaries of what was then World Wide Widgets International. With one exception, all these computer centers were composed of IBM mainframes, mostly of the 360 era, although we did then run an IBM 7000 system, and were starting an ill fated conversion to what is now Unisys. Most of the square footage of these immense rooms were taken over by dozens of mag tape drives, which were six foot high cabinets with vacuum tape buffer columns that were constantly twirling tapes, and that engaged the attention of several computer operators just to load new tapes and unload the processed ones. Another huge chunk of space was taken up by the tape storage library room.

Right off the central corridor that connected all these computer rooms was a rather large suite of offices. These were taken up by the IBM service personnel, on site 24 hours a day to keep all that hardware humming. On rolling carts you would find the wiring diagrams for all the equipment, and the diagnostic tools these SEs (Service Engineers) needed. There were probably bins of spare parts somewhere, but I am sure that the IBM version of NAPA could be called any time for parts delivery.

As I got into the minicomputer business, we used a combination of contracted maintenance from the vendor (sometimes with on site personnel), and a certain amount of training of our own engineers. For several years my best friend was one such WWW engineer who had gone to our vendor's hardware schools and was quite competent for most repairs. It was my pleasure to work with him on a number of problems. I learned a lot as my friend would stick scope probes here and there among the wirewrap pins looking for what he would call the "sneaky peak" that should NOT be there. I was able to help him out by writing diagnostic programs to exercise certain parts of the equipment that he needed to run, in a certain sequence, perhaps with a particular timing. Generally I would write these diagnostics in assembler, but some times it was easier to just do the code in pure binary and fatfinger it in through the console switches. When he would find the problem, he would whip out his soldering iron and replace the offending IC. In the early 80's, a single minicomputer circuit board could easly cost between $3K and $10k, so you fixed the broken components.

Those days are all over. Now when your PC breaks, it is usually rather easy to isolate the problem to a specific board, and fix it by tossing the board away and buying another one. IBM used to sell something called a Technical Manual when the PC, the XT, and the AT were being produced. In addition to containing all the bios code, it also contained many circuit diagrams, giving you a chance to fix your computer yourself (or with the aid of your friendly local hardware guy). Not only does IBM no longer sell this manual, there is little if any hope of getting anything like it from any of the other zillion vendors of PC clones. And if you did, the manual they sell today will be obsolete tomorrow, when somebody comes out with a new chip that obsoletes an entire board. We do have some sets of manuals around our offices, but they are oriented towards the person who wants to design his own circuit boards, rather than the people who want to fix them.

For large companies like WWW, board replacement is quite cost effective. IBM never gave those SEs away, although back then their cost was Bundled into the rental bill. (Don't forget, back then IBM would not Sell you a computer, you could only Rent one from them.) The main problem is in a large plant with maybe 300 PCS, bought from several different companies, over several years time, it can be madness to try to figure out just what is in a particular box, so that when it breaks, you have some hope of knowing what to think about replacing. There is little hope of stocking spares for all these kinds of systems, but you can stock generic spares to some degree. You can have a bin of video cards, a rack of monitors, and a box of disk drives.

It is painful, but the first thing that anybody should do with a new computer, is To plug it in, but Not to see if the games have been improved since the last OS release, but to inventory all the stuff that is in the box, or came with it. (You plug it in so the case is grounded while you are fiddling around inside it. You Don't power it up while you are fingergepoken.)

I had the pleasure of helping a friend upgrade his office computer recently. This particular computer came from a company that he has dealt with off and on over many years, that he calls CheapoTek. They aren't a local company, and this isn't their real name, but the name is indicative of what you get when you buy something from some non name brand house. First of all, you can't even talk to their people unless you are fluent in several South East Asia dialects. Everything is done by fax, in this case using only technical nomenclature, which is about all the English that the vendor seems to understand. That, and dollar signs.

When the box arrives, it is in a generic case, and stuffed with whatever PC boards were on sale the week that they got the order. You get a pile of manuals of various levels of usefulness. In this particular case, the motherboard is made by Intel, and the manual for it is quite adequate. The CD Rom manual was all Japanese (or something equally unreadable). There was a very good manual for the modem, and no manual at all in any language for the disk drive. Unless one of the three pieces of paper for the CD Rom was really for the disk drive, and I just couldn't recognize it.

This is actually the first time in many years that I have had to crack a case. We took out every board (except the motherboard) and wrote down everything that seemed to be of use. Most important would be the as shipped settings of all the dip switches and jumpers. While these are getting used less and less (two of the boards on this computer were set up by a utility disk, and one was even plug and play), the motherboard and the modem both had them. Secondly would be any manufacturer's names, serial numbers, model numbers, and for the disk drive, all the funny numbers dealing with heads, cylinders and sectors. (And I will never cease to be amazed how they can cram 20 billion bits into a package that small. The 7010 system that I talked about earlier had a disk the size of a large grizzly bear that jumped around the room when the heads moved, and probably held less than a megabyte.)

The problem now is to find a place to put this information, along with all the manuals, so that when you need it in four years, you can find it. This must be a locally solved problem.

So, why would you care about all this? You want to write it all down now, before you load up a few hundred megabytes of software and data, and then not have the guts to tear your system apart for fear of zapping something. This is the problem I now face with my home system, with 800MB of its Gig used. You want to write it down at all, aside from the maintenance reasons, because someday you will probably want to Upgrade your shiny new system. And to upgrade it, you sort of have to know what is in there now. You don't want to go buy a SCSI disk drive when you have an IDE disk controller. Or find out after you buy a second IDE disk drive that the second of two ports on the controller is used by the CD Rom, which I now know is the case with my office system. You want to know what kinds of memory expansion possibilities you have (in my case, zilch without buying new memory boards).

Once you have done the inventory, then plug it all back together, and try the new games. (And they will be about the same as the old ones.) If it doesn't work, this would be a good time to see if the warrantee works. If you bought the system locally, preferably through an advertizer of ComputorLink (hey, I don't set purchasing policy at my friend's company), see what you can do about getting the missing documentation, or added documentation. Once you have done the inventory, you are in a much better shape to talk intelligently to your friendly salespersibling about what more you need to know, than when you couldn't wait to get the thing out his door and into your parlor.