Suits

Wire-wrap Tool

Sorting through piles of old junk, dutiful daughter pulls out this wire-wrap tool. Wire-wrap is a technique to construct electrical circuits. It was fairly common in 1980's. It was quick and easy and didn't require soldering. I didn't use it much, but there was one instance that stood out.

Back around 1980, Intel Corporation started building RAM disks for IBM mainframe computers. They set up their production facility in Deer Valley, a suburb on the north edge of Phoenix, Arizona. I got a job there in 1985 supporting Intel's real-time operating system for their 8086 microprocessor.

1984 VAX Assembly

By 1985, the RAM disk business was dying and the RAM disk crew was casting around for something new and they hit on the idea of making an IBM channel to Ethernet adapter. One of their first installations was at a bank in San Francisco where it was going to bridge the gap between their mainframe and a DEC VAX machine. Connecting to the VAX meant installing an Ethernet card and that required installing a wire-wrap jumper between two pins (out of several hundred) on the card cage backplane.

I was elected to install that jumper, so I went out and bought a suit. This was my first trip out into the field. I wasn't in the habit of wearing suits, and since there seemed be a great deal resting on this installation, I thought it might be a good idea to show up looking like I was a professional, or serious, or something. I'd read an article about suits in Playboy, and so I thought I knew what I was doing. Probably bought it at J.C. Penny.

Flew out to San Francisco, spent some time in the computer room with a couple of other technical guys. The IBM mainframe was the size of a locomotive, or so it seemed. The bank's computer guy stopped the mainframe while we hooked up the channel adapter. Stopped it in it's tracks. After we had made the connections, he flipped the switch and the IBM system resumed execution on the next instruction. No shutting down and rebooting, just stop and then resume.

We're out in the hall and a bigwig comes by to say hello. He was a big guy, but what made him big was the suit. I had never seen such a suit. My own suit paled in comparison. I cannot tell you why I felt that way. I mean an impartial observer would have said you have some guys wearing suits. I think there must have been some subconscious social conditioning at work. It was just the weirdest experience.