[Coco] Re: Has anyone worked with "big iron" sysems

[Mark McDougall]

Jim Cox wrote:

> What kind of hardware support was there for these systems? Did the
> manufacture have people to support these systems(I know IBM did) but
> did the customer also do the hardware support?

Part of my job was to troubleshoot the serial terminal lines that ran 
from the computer room out to 5 different buildings (all joined 
together) where people ran (usually) DEC dumb terminals. I had to 
determine whether it was the user, terminal, serial port on the comms 
patch panel, or the wiring that was at fault.

Faulty terminals were sent back to the manufacturer. Service calls for 
line printers or anything else that failed. The most we did was swap 
ports and/or wires around.

The washing-machine sized disk drives (300MB?) were serviced regularly 
in a round-robin fashion by the manufacturer. I don't ever recall having 
a fault in the main unit, but we wouldn't have gone near it if we did - 
instant service call.

Regards,
Mark