Okay so I was asked by my boss to come into work on the Saturday (just passed) and open the building up and help out for the people who were changing over the computer system. (New Hardware same software). The New hardware has different ports then the new ones.
Points of Interest on my Company's computers:
-CRT Dumb Terminals at every desk.
-Wired with DB25 Serial Wire
-30 terminals
-10 printers
Things that I learned:
There is no standard for the way the pins on a serial come out at the adapters. Some times the wire itself with change the order of the pins. (25 pins at the end of a serial cable) Sometimes the guy who set it up customizes the pins to make the terminal speak to the mux boxes. Sometimes there are adapters in the middle that change what signal is on what pin. Red pin might be in slot #2 on one end of the wire, and might be in slot #2 on the other end. But if the adapter in the middle criss crosses them, then all hellc an break loose.
So what they (my bosses) thought would take between 6 and 8 hours on one day. Took 20 hours spread out over two days. We had 3 people from the cable company the first day (for 11 and half hours) and our programmer, and myself, and the second day it was the owner of the cabling company (coming back) my self and programmer, for another eight and half hours. It went above and beyond crazy. It was testing every cable and every computer...
But I survived and I taking the second half of today off, and all of tomorrow off. My boss tried to talk me out of it, but I decided I need time away from the office. So that is it for me for now!
Points of Interest on my Company's computers:
-CRT Dumb Terminals at every desk.
-Wired with DB25 Serial Wire
-30 terminals
-10 printers
Things that I learned:
There is no standard for the way the pins on a serial come out at the adapters. Some times the wire itself with change the order of the pins. (25 pins at the end of a serial cable) Sometimes the guy who set it up customizes the pins to make the terminal speak to the mux boxes. Sometimes there are adapters in the middle that change what signal is on what pin. Red pin might be in slot #2 on one end of the wire, and might be in slot #2 on the other end. But if the adapter in the middle criss crosses them, then all hellc an break loose.
So what they (my bosses) thought would take between 6 and 8 hours on one day. Took 20 hours spread out over two days. We had 3 people from the cable company the first day (for 11 and half hours) and our programmer, and myself, and the second day it was the owner of the cabling company (coming back) my self and programmer, for another eight and half hours. It went above and beyond crazy. It was testing every cable and every computer...
But I survived and I taking the second half of today off, and all of tomorrow off. My boss tried to talk me out of it, but I decided I need time away from the office. So that is it for me for now!
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
Back in the day (read as: 20 years ago), when I ran that out of date crap, and it was out of date then as well, we had two things to make it all faster:
1> a standardized method to our madness. If they weren't all the way we wanted them, we made ALL of them the same way -- the way we wanted them
2> a tester, a handy tool to make certain that what we got was what we wanted.
Wow.