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toml_12953 · 01-07-2018, 09:36 PM

(01-07-2018 09:15 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:
(01-07-2018 08:28 PM)Mike (Stgt) Wrote: Darn, I hoped my hint was helpful enough. Few examples:

About 30 years ago we got CADAM on IBM mainframe by management decision. In the department nobody cared about this new tool but me. I diligently tested all the examples in the manuals even the chief spoke out his impression, that I was only playing with this toy. Until the day he wanted to sell a solution to a customer that was hardly to explain with orthographic views only. So the best engineer and me produced under time pressure an isometric view with the encasement partially opened to show the internals of the machinery (a detail of a beater mill. That days we only had 2-1/2 D, no 3D. It was ready just in time the boss had to leave. And he came back with the order. He never said again that I was playing. (Of cause I was playing, it was fun and as side effect I did a good job.)

CADAM was stable, but not absolutely stable. A crash once a day was normal. To reset a crashed machine was manual doing, time consuming for the draughtsman, annoying for the IT staff. One of the IBM manuals I have read (at least the abstract to get what it could do) described a programmable operator (PROP). I asked the IT chieftain to grant me more rights and read the PROP manual again. From then on, when a CADAM user used CPU but did no IO within one minute "my" PROP assumed this user needs a restart. Success! Without calling and waiting for help the draughtsman could continue his work. -- Few weeks later the person in charge for the complete mainframe came back to me: 'How did you do that?"

In this two examples I did know -- by my curiosity -- about the available tools and adopted them to solve given problems. In the next example it is a bit different, I got a task but no immediate solution.

Boss told me 'you may ask for everything but not for staff'. The task was deliver documentation for the client, complete, in time and according to the delivery. One delivery could be 20'000 items and more. No problem if there are no changes during delivery. That days PC came up, 286 or 386, 40MB hard disks, Windows 3.1, later Win98, mainframe's days had been counted. I tried to use EXCEL to manage the changes, it worked for tables with up to 10 items, alas with 20'000 items no result over night. Not at all a comfortable situation. Luckily with the latest VM/CMS came a system called Pipelines. Due to the failing EXCEL I took a closer look and found, it incorporates all fundamentals to compare files and brush up the results, but I have to analyse the task to the depth before I may assemble a pipe that helps. Result: tables with 20'000 rows and 65 columns took 30 seconds to compare and mark discarded and new items, get a new table of content, list for the departments what is missing, information for the management about the progress.
The mailing list about this Pipelines was very effective, no noise, problems solved within 5..8 appends, mostly the same day, I learned a lot from it. And of cause I am proud that I once could deliver a stable test case for a rare error.

Now I described in many words how helpful my playing around and hanging out in forums was, I hope your gain was worth it.

Ciao.....Mike

Excellent answer, Mike, thanks.

I think most of us have had situations where we got overly familiar with a new product and achieved something good or great. For the 1980 Census my boss asked me to build a system that would evaluate the workflow of a processing operation: station A could process 140 items per hour for one person, the output would go to station B which could process 22 items per hour for one person, and so on down the line. The question was how many people would you need at each station to keep the work flowing, and avoid a backlog, in the shortest possible time. A spreadsheet could handle this easily, but there was no Excel or Visicalc in 1978, so I built the model in FORTRAN on the Univac 1108 and it worked like a charm (if memory serves, which it doesn't always).

Things that make you really think are always good for you.

I worked for HEAP (Home Energy Assistance Program) in Onondaga County, New York. I was given the task of going over all the social security numbers of all the clients HEAP ever had and check to see if there were any people receiving duplicate benefits or otherwise ineligible for benefits. I was given access to a room full of paper files and eight weeks to check them all. I knew that all records were also stored online so I asked for and got access to the online database. After writing a program to automate my task, the computer did all the cross-checking in about three hours. The Commissioner was astounded. He asked why this hadn't been done before. I told him that it was because I had just started working for HEAP. From then on, I was his go-to IT guy. The actual IT department wasn't too pleased but with the backing of the Commissioner, I could ask for and get almost any computing services I wanted. I did almost end up in jail, though! I was demoing a license plate lookup program that accessed the NYSDMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) database. To show off, I entered the license plate number of Governor George Pataki. In a few minutes an agent from the State Police's BCI (Bureau of Criminal Investigation) was in my office wanting to know why I was accessing the Governor's info. Luckily, everyone at the demo vouched for me telling him it was just a demo.