[HN Gopher] The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
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The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
Author : wyndham
Score : 258 points
Date : 2024-08-06 03:49 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (books.worksinprogress.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (books.worksinprogress.co)
| ggm wrote:
| I'd forgotten how close to printing machines the old photocopiers
| were. You would basically either have a crap one you could
| operate yourself, or take your stuff to the printery to have
| professionals (a subset of librarians I think, or the logical
| join over librarians and computer operations staff) do it for
| you. Printing machines had a fleet of maintainers, craft unions
| who walked off the job if you touched a dial.
|
| They were amazing at doing things which really mattered:
| shrinking an A0 architectural drawing down but maintaining aspect
| ratio. Adjusting offsets for the print for binding signatures, so
| the 1st and 16th page was not too far out because of wrapping
| around the other 8 pairs of pages. Even just working out how to
| rotate the pages for N-up printing. But the GUI sucked. I think
| they called ours "the bindery" because it's main gig was doing
| PHD from soup to nuts, binding included.
|
| The repair techs had the most amazing flight cases, packed with
| tools which served one specific purpose.Like, A doohickey to
| adjust the corona wire, without dismantling the imaging and toner
| roller, with a tonne of equipment hovering over your head on a
| gas-lift. Screwdrivers with very very carefully chosen lengths.
| Torque wrenches. It was high tech meets motor racing meets.. IBM.
|
| I am told they were paid better than many computer techs. The IBM
| guy was paid IBM scale to fix it on IBMs timescales. the xerox
| guy did more random shit, with more devices, more often.
|
| They had a very corporate look. that amazing briefcase or six.
| Suit, tie. Very acceptable.
|
| I know a guy who worked for a paper-folding-and-envelope-stuffing
| company and it was very similar culturally: can-do, fix anything,
| but working on giant multi-million dollar machines which were
| used twice a year to do tax mailouts, and election materials, and
| the rest of the time rented to the original spam merchants for
| 10c per thousand mailouts. The secondhand value of these machines
| were like photocopiers: Really significant. He was brought out of
| retirement to help take one apart into TEU equivalent chunks to
| be shipped to Singapore from Brisbane. His retirement gig at one
| point was repairing Espresso machines, he said it made him feel
| familiar and useful.
|
| The era which was the end of the typing pool was fascinating. All
| kinds of arcane roles which only make sense in the absence of
| email and tiny printers everywhere. Some of those jobs had been
| there from the days of hand-copying, Dickens-era and before.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe,
| the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a
| couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a
| dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the
| south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home
| office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything,
| and mostly he could.
|
| But one time the machine started writing crap on random things
| - screens, printers, worst of all disks - could take a day or
| to to recover after it scribbled across the equivalent of the
| root file system (giant head-per-track coffee table sized
| platters). The poor engineers couldn't figure it out, it
| happened so in frequently eventually they flew a guy out from
| head office in the US - he came with a wooden stick - he ran it
| down a card cagore in the IO process, nothing happened, he
| tried the next row bang! it crashed, after we were back up he
| continued with his wooden stick doing a binary search for the
| source, eventually he pulled a card and 3 little solder balls
| fell into his hand, they'd been sitting there loose against IC
| pins since it was installed
|
| As you point out sometimes it just takes having the correct
| tool and knowing how to use it
| dmd wrote:
| > way slower than your phone
|
| For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit.
| A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have
| been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second.
|
| Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion
| instructions per second. That's a _million_ times faster.
| brk wrote:
| True, but 90% of the mainframe instructions weren't
| tracking, telematics, data exfiltration, and user
| profiling. So it kinda evens out.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion
| instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
|
| Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found
| is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly
| corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS
| which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times
| faster than Cray-1.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As
| such it was designed to push the performance envelope in
| a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't
| even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction
| processing and reliability. They were substantially
| slower than contemporary supercomputers.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually
| similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to
| illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes
| and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe
| CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie.
| Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache.
|
| Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but
| way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric.
| There's a lot more focus on parallelization and
| horizontal scaling.
|
| Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a
| supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a
| massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may
| get more consistency and reliability for well defined
| tasks.
| kragen wrote:
| your phone is 5-10 billion instructions per second, a
| thousand times faster. it's probably a quad-core in-order
| arm running at 1-2 gigahertz, not 1-2 terahertz
| dmd wrote:
| Instructions and hertz have not been equivalent for
| almost a quarter of a century now, though.
| kragen wrote:
| not equivalent, but close enough in this case; even my
| laptop only manages less than 2 ipc per core, and the
| error in your earlier comment is a factor of 1000
| bruce511 wrote:
| We still have an old printing machine. It came as part of an
| acquisition and took a truck to move. We rent a small unit in
| an industrial complex to house it.
|
| Nobody knows how old it is. It predated the folk who came with
| it (all of whom were close to retirement.)
|
| It's still running (looked after by one of the retirees on a
| part time basis.) He does print runs a couple times a week. To
| seem him with an oil can in his hands is to step back in time.
|
| It's more or less neutral profit-wise, but pays his wage and
| keeps some old customers happy. When he gives up the machine
| goes too (likely for scrap I guess).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Beautiful little story. I love when such things are allowed
| to exist.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Reference - a great read -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
| begueradj wrote:
| Indeed: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133653) and
| (https://auxiliarymemory.com/2017/01/06/rereading-the-soul-
| of...) ... and that's not the same book :)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Good share. Haven't read but looking at the wiki entry it's an
| interesting book, Technology requires a culture to sustain it.
|
| To use a fancy word there's a "noosphere" around that carries
| knowledge and lore along with it.
|
| Plus the usual kind of Deming wisdom about real knowledge
| organisation: "in many ways opposite of
| traditional management...innovations are started at the
| grassroots level.", and "people will give their best
| when the work itself is challenging and rewarding."
|
| That atmosphere is still around in engineering teams in smaller
| companies where there's a good range of advancement within
| engineering and some stable products so there's a stream of
| old-timers and apprentices building and exchanging chops.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
| EncomLab wrote:
| One of my top 5 favorite books of all time - the audiobook
| version on audible is excellent as well. A lost world - and we
| are all worse off for it.
| avisser wrote:
| "a great read" - Almost underselling it. It won the Pulitzer
| for non-fiction that year.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| This book is so good. It's about building early computers but
| it feels just like tech does today in the way it's described.
| Which make it feel like this bigger context you're reading
| into. That even before computers were mainstream, there were
| still those who tinkered.
|
| Two things are especially memorable to me. One is a casual
| remark in the book that they found the best way to get things
| done is to pair someone very experienced and cynical with
| someone very inexperienced and naive. Combined they would get
| lots done together compared to either alone. I think this is
| still true today.
|
| The other thing is the intro. It's about the head of the
| project getting a group together and renting a sailboat on
| vacation. On the sailboat the get tossed and at times feel like
| they barely survived and it ends with someone saying "if this
| was his vacation...what did this man do for fun!?"
| katzenversteher wrote:
| I while ago (around 2010) I worked at Oce Technologies R&D and at
| least to me the machines while incredibly complex where quite
| easy to operate and maintain. In fact every developer was allowed
| to print their private stuff (non commercial) on the machines
| under development. I believe this really helped because we
| basically had to become operators and maintainers and got a feel
| of their roles. If you print something for yourself, family or
| friends you also take a better look at the output or sometimes
| have a very specific use case in mind.
| goffley3 wrote:
| This goes a long way in explaining the incredibly warm and
| sociable, yet undeniably peculiar Xerox tech that I would
| interact with on a regular basis. Despite him not actually
| working for the company, I would have to call him in constantly
| to get him to fix one or more of the machines we had in the
| office.
| neilv wrote:
| The latter half has a lot of criticism of allegedly boneheaded
| management (from the perspective of the writer and researchers
| they quote).
| rini17 wrote:
| Strictly siloing maintenance away from sales and development is
| boneheaded clearly, not allegedly.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| This passage particularly struck me: _He noticed when a
| technician on a call began by examining copies that had been
| thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with
| the machine was different from what the customer had reported.
| "The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad," one
| technician explained "Just go to the trashcan to find the bad
| copies and then... interpret what connects them all."_
|
| On a related note, I'd like to _highly_ recommend Lucy Suchman 's
| work, mentioned in this article as _Plans and Situated Actions:
| The Problem of Human-Machine Communication_ , but the updated
| version now called _Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and
| Situated Actions_. The new version has several extra chapters and
| some other revisions. I 've read it several times, and had my
| mind blown each time.
| indrora wrote:
| For a long while, I've been helping people diagnose problems
| with 3D printers and one of the things that stands out to me is
| how often people throw away bad prints while they're
| troubleshooting.
|
| One of the first things I ask someone now is to give me their
| test prints for the last few changes they've made and what they
| changed, if they remember. Nine times out of ten, just looking
| at other factors, I've been able to pinpoint what's wrong.
|
| Interestingly, this has also led me to a few "is it turned on"
| questions, the first of which is "when is the last time you
| tightened all the bolts that should be tight and loosened the
| bolts that should be loose?" The simple act of making sure
| tight things are square and tight has resolved many an
| unrelated problem because it makes you check so many different
| parts of the machine.
|
| This also correlates with one of the takeaways from the old
| Computerworld column called Shark Tank. The most common aspect
| of the solution was to simply go and observe the failure,
| because so often it was an unaccounted for externality -- such
| as a cleaning crew unplugging something at 2AM when a system
| would "mysteriously" go down.
| gumby wrote:
| This was such important and transformational work and I remember
| at the time being quite dismissive of it.
|
| I knew Orr's and Suchman's work (they worked in a physically
| adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all
| under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people).
| Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was
| such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came from
| ignorance.*
|
| To be fair, I was not the only one: the insights described in
| this book draft surprised a lot of people, not just how they
| improved the copiers but how those two even approached the
| problem (starting with the sociology of the repair workers). It
| sure surprised Xerox management. But I've heard it said many
| times that this work led to restructuring the paper path in a way
| that justified (paid for) everything spent on PARC.
|
| I did grow up of course and now do see my work (machines,
| chemistry, etc) as a small part of a large social system. A
| successful company has to base its product plans starting this
| way.
|
| To choose an example of failure to appreciate the social scope
| (but not pick on it) the crypto folks spend their time on
| technology, based on a social model they _want to exist_ rather
| than the one that currently does. I think it's a big reason why
| it's barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? Xerox was the
| same, and it helped them sell a lot of copiers, but didn't make
| them as ubiquitous as they could have been. Another example:
| everybody laughs at Google for launching "products" that go
| nowhere and are quickly forgotten. We all know it's because of a
| screwed-up, internally-focused culture. But sometimes a product
| succeeds without marketing (e.g. gmail, at the time) because it
| happened to be matched to the actual, external need. It makes
| this kind of continuous failure even more damning.
|
| * TBH, 40 years later I have not 100% shed this view -- e.g. my
| attitude towards complaints about git. Maybe this means I'm still
| a jerk.
| com wrote:
| Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me
| than I was expecting it to when I started reading it.
|
| Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick
| in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-
| determinism to whatever you describe yourself now?
|
| I'm really interested in how we can intervene earlier in
| people's journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just
| waiting for enough experience to build up...
| gumby wrote:
| Thanks. I think I mainly developed more empathy.
|
| I married an artist. She knew no physics, no advanced
| mathematics, but plenty of philosphy and languages as well as
| the technology and philosophy of representational art. She
| was a lot smarter than me and we spent a lot of time
| expanding each others' horizons, not deliberately or
| didactically but just through living.
|
| Also so many things seem clear when you are young and I was
| repeatedly humbled by how complicated the real world is
| compared to academia or research (where I worked on _very_
| abstruse subjects, e.g. the denotational semantics of
| reflexive languages).
|
| I think you see this in a lot of people: libertarianism and
| even Ayn Rand is more popular with young people ("hey I'm
| smart and responsible; why are there all these annoying and
| pointless rules getting in my way?"). I was never a
| libertarian but back then I was sympathetic to Rousseau. But
| you have fewer grown up libertarians because many learn to
| realise that sure, things are imperfect, but we live in a
| world that evolved (sometimes well and sometimes not) to work
| with fallable systems and lots of opinions, some well thought
| out and some...not so.
| kragen wrote:
| > _the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a
| social model they want to exist rather than the one that
| currently does. I think it's a big reason why it's barely
| impacted the world in, what, 15 years?_
|
| assuming you mean cryptocurrencies, i think they kept several
| million people alive throughout the venezuelan civil war,
| sustained wikileaks through the visa and mastercard blockade,
| and have made sci-hub and library genesis financially stable;
| maybe they haven't impacted the people in your direct vicinity,
| but they've made a huge impact in places like moldova which
| don't have functional currency
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, cryptocurrencies not cryptography. Bad of me to use that
| contraction for anything but the latter.
|
| Have they really made a significant difference? A bit of
| searching around resulting in a few articles with anecdotes,
| and if someone's life really was saved this way of course it
| made a huge difference to them.
|
| But for some macro perspective the best I could find was the
| "Crypto Adoption Index"
| (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2023-global-crypto-
| adoption...), where VE, or MD don't even register (AR barely
| does). In fact US is listed as having one of the highest
| levels of adoption, and it's basically invisible here.
|
| Countries with nonfunctional currency systems usually do
| better by adopting an existing stable currency like USD or EU
| (or even better someplace economically coupled with them).
|
| But I'm no expert and I'd be happy to be proven wrong. On a
| financial macro perspective cryptocurrencies don't even
| exist.
| kragen wrote:
| pretty much the entire currency black market here in
| argentina used to run on cryptocurrencies, which is more
| significant than it sounds given how large a fraction of
| argentina's employment is illegal (something like a third,
| last i heard). i think us banks have taken some of that
| business away from cryptocurrencies in recent years, but
| every illegal moneychanger still accepts them even if most
| of their business runs over zelle
|
| as for how countries might do better, while it is
| interesting to discuss what policies policymakers ought to
| adopt, argentine (and turkish, venezuelan, etc.)
| policymakers do not want to adopt the policies they ought
| to adopt; they want to adopt the policies that serve their
| political interests. the rest of us are left to figure out
| how to cope with their terrible policies. and that's the
| sense in which bitcoin matters; it makes it possible for
| argentines and venezuelans to do things like save money,
| leave the country, and send money to their families back
| home when they're working abroad
|
| on a financial macro perspective, there's currently about
| 1.1 trillion dollars stored in bitcoin, which is a few days
| of global gdp. other cryptocurrencies together are
| something like half a trillion. it's entirely plausible
| that 80%, 90%, 95%, or 99% of bitcoin's number is owned by
| keys that were lost in disk drive failures back in the cpu
| mining epoch, but that's less likely for the other
| cryptocurrencies. so i don't know that i'd agree that they
| don't exist on a financial macro perspective. certainly
| they aren't anywhere near the importance of asset classes
| like real estate, commercial paper, forex, commodities
| futures, or stocks, and it's questionable how much real
| liquidity exists in the market--if satoshi were to start
| selling off his coins now, how much would it tank the
| market before he was done?
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| > Though they were doing messy blue-collar work, Xerox required
| the technicians to act and dress white-collar. They carried their
| tools in a briefcase.
|
| We don't carry tools in briefcases because it makes us appear
| white collar, but because the shell is hard and protective, there
| are many sizes, and the boxy interior can be formed to however
| you like if you use foam and cut it to fit your tools. Briefcases
| fit readily into many tight spots for transportation. The photo
| shows the usual layout of tools that techs use. Companies sell
| high end equipment in briefcase-like containers because it keeps
| them safe and waterproof in needed situations.
|
| Not a big fan of the anthropology aspect. It's a job. Techies
| improvise, it's not a clandestine operation to fix a machine.
| vajrabum wrote:
| I spent nearly 20 years fixing computers and other electronics.
| Repair techs are my original work tribe and it was a fun if
| sometimes stressful way to make a living. I got away from it
| because the money went away. That said, I never wanted to fix
| copiers. They were always finicky, messy and dirty, but this is a
| really great piece and three things stand out for me.
|
| The article claims that PARC paid for itself (1) through the
| anthropological sociological studies of copier repair technicians
| which revealed shortcomings in the engineering of the copiers and
| resulted in changes to the paper path and handling in newer
| designs and significantly reduced maintenance cost and
| difficulty. Two, enabling information sharing between repair
| technicians over radios and technician created and maintained
| documentation, saved the company 5-8% of service cost and these
| innovations were resisted by services management which was
| invested in the idea that copier repair technicians should be
| cheap, interchangable monkeys. Three, Xerox management likely
| left significant money on the table because they fundamentally
| and willfully misunderstood copier repair and copier repair
| technicians and the value they were creating for the company.
| Likely, mostly because repair was seen as a cost center which in
| an ideal world would be eliminated entirely.
|
| 1. It's really astonishing how much and in how many ways PARC
| paid for itself and yet business literature and likely Xeroxes
| management often focuses on the money left on the table for
| others to grab and asserts there was a failure.
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