sorting was: The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3895

says...

You must not have taken a tour of the P'ok manufacturing line in '76 or so. Instead of 30-40 systems in final test there may have been one or two, all destined for the "Department of Interrior".

Sure, but that was early '70s. The late '70s were a disaster. The US economy was in the beginnings of stagflation and no one was spending for capital equipment. With interest rates in the double- digits it's hard to make the investment in capital equipment back. FS had been buried and the head stones smashed by then.

Sure. There have been several projects like that, though not on that scale. I was lent out to the IBM Instruments Group for a year to help on a project that was in real trouble. The group exec held weekly staff meetings Sunday 11:00AM-3:00PM. "If my people are working Sundays, so are you." I had a third-line manager holding scope probes for me. Those times are gone.

Sure, that's obvious now. OTOH, in the '80s I showed how every PC we bought saved .1 head count. We needed something like 40 PS-2s for the project (the PCs were going to secretaries and such who also requested PS-2s) and I showed how the productivity would save us four engineers. "Well, of course we didn't put those four people in the head count plan. We buttumed we're going to realize this productivity." ;-)

-- Keith