[time-nuts] Maintaining boatanchors

[J. Forster]

I've found engineers tend to be squirrels. A number of times they've said
to me "I'll look in my files". They will often either scan it for me or
let me borrow the original informally so I can Xerox it locally.

IMO, going through Sales or making an "official" request costs a bunch and
ir rarely successful. It's also worth asking "do you remember any major
customers of this unit?>"

-John

===============


> Hi
>
> At least for us the process goes like:
>
> 1) Customer wants more than what's in the card file on in the electronic
> record system
> 2) Decision is made about how bad they want it
> 3) Engineer (not a tech) is assigned to dig the paper data up
> 4) A *guess* is made about which of many thousands of boxes *might* have
> the info in it
> 5) A request is put in to retrieve the most likely dozen boxes from off
> site storage
> 6) The boxes are gone through looking for the information
> 7) loop through steps 4,5,6 how ever many times needed
> 8) The data is re-formated so it's readable and rational
> 9) Out it goes
>
> The whole process runs 1 to 4 weeks depending ...
>
> Bob
>
>
> On Oct 24, 2010, at 12:02 PM, J. Forster wrote:
>
>> I buy a lot of 10-20 year old test and other gear. When I try to get
>> info
>> on some things the reaction is usually, "Oh, we havn't made that thing
>> for
>> AGES now. It turns out "ages" is anything over about 3 months. "We now
>> have the xxxx model which is SOO much better than that old POS, and it's
>> only $25,000 more w/o options".
>>
>> At that point I ask to speak to the oldest engineer or srevice tech.
>>
>> SIGH!!!
>>
>> BTW, I have started and joined a number of Yahoo Groups because sharing
>> and pooling info is now easy electronically, and in many cases is the
>> only
>> source of information, other than suppliers of scanned or copied
>> manuals,
>> like Artek Media.
>>
>> FWIW,
>>
>> -John
>>
>> ================
>>
>>> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 02:44:51PM -0700, J. Forster wrote:
>>>> Very true, except it's more like 5-10 years.
>>>
>>> 	These days John is absolutely right... likely none of the
>>> developers, none of the equipment, perhaps not even the corporate
>>> shell of the division or department that designed the product and
>>> wrote the software survives.   Probably the source code was thrown
>>> out with the old servers that were sold for scrap... or just carted off
>>> to be shredded with all the other paper and electronic records...
>>>
>>> 	Horror stories abound about organizations that need to make some
>>> minor patch or change to source code of a popular product for some
>>> important customer even just a few years after its release and nobody
>>> can find the right source code or the right build environment
>>> (compilers, libraries, OS etc and the hardware they ran on) or if they
>>> can be found it takes many many hours of expensive time and talent to
>>> reconstruct the right stuff to actually make a code image that matches
>>> what is shipping.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>  Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston,
>>> Mass
>>> 02493
>>> "An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
>>> 'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted
>>> pole -
>>> in
>>> celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now
>>> either."
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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