back to article Stick a pin in a sales droid to avoid cable voodoo

In this week's edition of On-Call, our weekly wander through readers' reminiscences, we're indebted to reader Shannon who's shared a tale of his late 1990s experience working in “a small-ish computer sales and repair shop.” “This was when things were booming in the custom-built computer market,” Shannon explains. “Western …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Rich 11

      Scuzzy

      The first SCSI device I had to deal with was a CD drive connected to an XT in a library where I provided one day a week support to the campus. I'd never seen a CD drive before, and had never even heard of SCSI. Fortunately, they'd kept the instruction manuals. Once I'd discounted any change to the software or driver configuration, I took the case apart and looked at the SCSI card: it was covered in grease stained yellow with nicotine (they still allowed smoking in all areas at the time). I checked the cable as best I could; there didn't seem to be any dry joints or anything. The CD drive mechanically worked, but I opened it up just to see if there might be anything which would give me a clue. Nothing. I knew I'd have to call the support number in Canada (this was before anyone offered email support, and indeed a year before we even got an Internet connection to the college).

      I rang the number, waiting until 2pm (GMT) when there'd be someone in their office. I was told the expert on that piece of kit only worked afternoons due to a recent illness, so I said I'd call back in four hours and hung up. Unfortunately the librarians weren't willing to keep the place open until 6pm (understandable -- they'd got homes to go to and kids to feed), and I had no office on campus (large parts of which were locked up after 5.30 anyway), so I went home. The house I'd been living in until a month previously had had a phone, but the flat I'd just moved into did not. I ended up making the call to Canada from a pay phone at the crossroads down the road, feeding 10p coins in by the bucketful, repeating "Sorry, what?" as the words of the expert were drowned out by the evening traffic. But he was very helpful and we did get the CD drive working again.

    2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Oh yeah, SCSI. Cable lenghts and terminators. Whenever possible I insisted on an active terminator with a little LED, that way you could tell them apart.

      Absolutely frustrating: stuff that was support to work acording to the manuals/specs but never did.

      Absolutely fascinating: stuff that never could work according to the manuals/specs but nevertheless worked perfectly.

    3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Pint

      Active SCSI Terminators

      All a standard part of the Field Service Toolkit back in the day.

      Along with a Soldering Iron, Oscilloscope (or if you were one of the top flight engineers) a Datascope

      a 2ft thick pile of schematics.

      and tubes of various 74LS chips.

      And finaly, a wire-wrap tool for the really old servers with a wire-wrapped backplane.

      Thanks for the trip down memory lane this wet Friday Afternoon. Have one on me.

  2. Triggerfish

    Aaaah many years ago, at home figuring out how to install NT and get it to join a domain. I spent many fun hours not being able to figure out why the server I had just built would not talk, swapped cables, reinstalled, invented new swear words and everything.

    Several hours later I learnt the difference between crossover cables and patch cables.

    1. GlenP Silver badge

      I had an operator (ex dp manager even) who I don't think ever did learn the difference between X-over & patch.

      He'd been brought up on 5250 Twinax, and he couldn't even get that right. Every time he installed a new terminal he'd insist on connecting it to the last terminal in one of the existing runs, even if that meant trailing a long cable down the office and across the floor - he couldn't figure out that you could insert one in the middle of the run just by unscrewing a couple of connectors. I have a hatred of cable covers running across floors to this day.

      We then went over to thinwire Ethernet using those make-before-break plug in drop leads which he could just about cope with. He retired shortly after we started to move over to Cat-5.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Flame

        "We then went over to thinwire Ethernet using those make-before-break plug in drop leads which he could just about cope with. "

        Oh crap, that just brought back some horrible memories! The local Regional Health Authority HQ had those wall points. The old Victorian building had old Victorian "heating". ie a cast iron pipe about 4" diameter that ran along the walls just above desk height. So the cable installers had installed the network co-ax in the mains trunking(!!) just above the heating pipe. Every now and then the spring connectors in an unused socket reached a certain age and the heat expansion would be just enough that everyone south of the offending socket would be disconnected from the network. Being in the days of Novel, this required a server reboot once the offending socket had been replaced.

        Similarly, the Cyrix 686 based PCs in the training room at a Victorian prison. Now most of us here old enough to remember them are well aware that not only was the Cyrix 686 CPU sensitive to overheating but it ran *HOT* anyway. The problem in this particular situation was the case design. The warm air was exhausted at the side of the case and the cool/ambient air was sucked in from the back. About 3" away from the cast iron heating pipe. Fortunately I spotted this and had a decent multimeter which included a temperature probe. The incoming ambient air that close to the pipe was a shade under 40oC so not really offering all that much cooling effect to the already hot CPUs. No wonder the bloody things were crashing and shutting down regularly,

  3. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Reminds me of...

    the fun acronym.

    System

    Can't

    See

    It

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm convinced that we are employing that sales droid here ...

    Anonymous because I'd prefer not to have another raging argument with the idiot about not doing the specs properly ...

  5. Tim Jenkins

    Macintosh HDI-30

    That square, friction-fit SCSI port on the back of mid-90's Apple PowerBooks. Guaranteed not to be inserted correctly by the user (preventing a successful boot), or to be plugged/unplugged while in action, or to get twisted slightly by the cable to the daisychained device and causing the laptop to lose connection with its own HDD rather violently....

    1. Stoneshop
      Devil

      Re: Macintosh HDI-30

      Another Fine Invention from the people who brought you the DB25 SCSI abomination.

      SCSI signalling is, given the data rates and the cable length, supposed to use twisted pair cabling. Running all your return signals through one wire is a Very Bad Idea even though it kinda sorta works if you squint a bit, so the cost-cutting builders* of the Apple ][ went with that, and kept it alive over multiple generations of Macintosh.

      * We know who they are**

      ** See also the Apple ][ floppy drives. Getting a bunch made with the head movement stepper drivers left out, and that function done by a bit of software and four transistors on the controller card was apparently sufficiently cheaper, initially. But increasing demand caused standard Shugart-interface drive prices to drop sharply, while Apple ][ drives stayed roughly the same price.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

          Apple ][

          It was indeed a stepper motor in the Apple ][ floppy drive. Head movement came from a spiral grove on a cheap plastic disk rather than the usual metal screw. The clacky-clacky-clacky boot sound was the calibration procedure - spin downward for a long time and let the needle skip. Track positioning and sector alignment was all performed in crude software so it needed massive physical padding. Spindle drive was your average cassette tape player motor - brushed motor and a simple negative resistance circuit to regulate speed. There was also the legendary bug where sector interleaving was wrong, resulting in throughput of about one sector per revolution. All this is why there were hacker DOSes that ran 8x faster and sometimes boosted floppy storage.

          The Apple ][ was obscenely crude, lazy, and overpriced. Everything was a cool trick that wasn't quite right. It was endless educational fun for recreational hacking but excruciating for business software.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: Apple ][

            The Apple ][ was obscenely crude, lazy, and overpriced. Everything was a cool trick that wasn't quite right. It was endless educational fun for recreational hacking but excruciating for business software.

            Agreed.

            Yet for me it remains the most interesting thing Apple's ever done. Its sheer half-assed nature is far more appealing to me than any of their subsequent "enjoy but do not question, mortals!" efforts.

  6. Terry 6 Silver badge
    Flame

    All sorts of things of interest in this

    And it's all through the computer business.

    There's the components that look the same, but aren't.

    There's the different grades of apparently the same thing, that the user (the bill payer) won't understand.

    There's the strange and unhelpful naming of different versions.

    There's the price gradient, with one version costing next to nothing and the one just slightly better costing significantly, even several times, more.

    There's the amazing lack of clarity by the manufacturers about what the differences are.

    Simple example, ordering a little printer that's going to be for low consumption public use. I want the best capacity cartridges available, not just for cost reasons, but to save the frequency of swapping them too. In the range I've been looking at there are large and extra large cartridges. As far as I could work out, only some models took the XL. But getting the specification from the manufacturer's website was just about impossible. Eventually I had to give up, and just ordered the printer model I thought best for our uses, accepting that it probably won't take the XL size, because I could otherwise end up spending a lot more money on a very slightly different model that might also turn out not to accept the larger size.

  7. xybyrgy

    Those tiny screw threads

    My bane was those tiny screw threads on IBM SCSI connector thumb screws - always trying to cross thread themselves. (I swear, it wasn't me!)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Windows 98 and NT 4

    I worked in an computer company, where if you wanted a PC you have to build it from the pile of bits in the corner. This PC had a SCSI card and internal drive and I installed Win98. IIRC worked fine apart from the occasional crash, but after a few months I decided to upgrade to Windows NT 4. No changes to the HW what so ever, but the setup kept BSOD. After much investigation.... no terminator resistor packs on the drive.... Installed them, worked fine. Never worked out why one OS worked and the other didn't.

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