Seeking Info on XDS Sigma 7 APL 2879
aleph0
no offense taken
wandering OT: it's interesting how the quality of the site operation is taken as a measure of the quality of the hardware
to some extent, this is justified -- Amdahl machines almost never failed, so Amdahl sites appeared well run
CDC machines were always pushing the physical limits, so they frequently gave their operators a hard time
info.freeserve.co.uk (phil chastney) writes: I give the latter group the breastle "Official Worrier". I've been in the same position - forced to give up time doing useful work in order to...
IBM came somewhere in between
I knew the site manager at a government research establishment chock full of all sorts of hardware, and he logged time between failures, time to respond and time to fix - he said IBM appeared to be better, because if there was a callout, an engineer appeared within 20 minutes -- if there weren't any engineers they sent a trainee -- if the trainees were all busy, they sent the receptionist, the mail-room boy, anybody -- just so the customer felt "something was being done"
That's right. My first job out of college was going to be working on Xerox APL, but employed by Honeywell as the transition mentioned in earlier posts had already taken place. I...
the other manufacturers would send an engineer when they had one
the result was that IBM's time to respond was low, but the MTTF, measured from the time the failure was reported, was not significantly different from the other manufacturers
mind you, I'm not sure how large the sample was for Amdahl -- at another site, I got to know the resident Amdahl engineer -- he hated the job -- he was bored stupid, because Amdahls never went wrong -- ours was running under UTM, so we suggested he learn Unix properly, then he could fix the Sun machines, perhaps
I'm not sure these ramblings wil interest the APLers, so I've trimmed the address list
all the best . . . phil
Seeking Info on XDS Sigma 7 APL 2880
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