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Armageddon...IBM Installs Usage Meters
This story is] about the only time I ever got in trouble with IBM. I didn't include it in the original batch because I wanted to get with some of the people that were there with me and have them check it for accuracy. I saw an article in Discover magazine about why teenagers do some of the things they do. They did a lot of MRI scans and found out that the frontal lobe of the brain doesn't fully develop until you are 25 years old. This is the part of the brain that says," If I do this - This might happen to me". I guess my frontal lobe didn't develop until a few years later. I know my thinking certainly changed.Van Gardner
IBM had always rented their machines for an amount based on one shifts usage. The rental rates included customer engineering maintenance and parts and cover the first 176 hours a month the system was in use. Each hour of use thereafter was subject to a rate of 1/176 of 40%. Any extra shift usage was at a 40% reduced hourly rate. This was done on an honor system where the customer reported his usage to IBM once a month. As the customer base grew it became apparent some of them were being less than truthful. They were wearing out the mechanical machines and aging the vacuum tubes in the computers. It was ok to rent the free hours to someone else as long as the total usage was reported. Some were even blatant by demanding three shift CE coverage while reporting one shift usage. IBM was loosing millions of dollars of revenue so they decided to install usage meters on each machine.
I attended the customer meeting when the meter program was announced to them. It was not well received. One of their Supervisors said he didn’t know if they wanted us to put the meters on the machines. I told him he really didn’t have a choice about it as the machines belong to IBM and they were just renting them. If he wanted to purchase the machines they would be his and we would not put meters on them and he could use them as much as he wanted. Then the only thing he had to worry about was how many shifts he wanted his maintenance agreement to cover. Then I said to him, “I don’t know what you are worried about. These meters are only going to catch the people who have been cheating on their usage and you people don’t have a thing to worry about”. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything else. Jim Moss told me years later that he thought that should have been sent in to Reader’s Digest as a “Perfect Squelch” article.
We went into a big hurry up meter installation program that really impacted us man hours wise. Finally they were all installed but I spent a lot of time the next year at meeting explaining what started the meters and what stopped them. It was not a simple operation. They were all controlled off the CPU meter. It started running when you loaded a program and stopped when the program stopped. If you used a tape drive it’s meter started running when you sent the first command to the tape drive. The tape drive meter would stop when you issued a rewind and unload command, or manually unloaded the drive. Printer meters started with the first line of print and stopped when the restore button or space button was pressed. Operators could save a lot of usage time on I/O devices by knowing what to do to stop the meter.
The meters were installed and the revenue did go up but some customers immediately found a loophole. It was called “Rerun Credit”. If a customer was an hour into some program and it failed due to a machine malfunction they could apply for an hours rerun credit and that hour would be deducted from their monthly meter reading. This again was on the honor system. The honest customers now had to keep up with rerun time to get their credit where before the meters they just reran the job. Now all customers would complain about having to rerun a job.
At this time things were going good in the Math Analysis side of the house. They had a new all transistor 7090 computer system and the 704 would be going back to IBM as soon as all the programs were checked out on the 7090. The only real problem we were having was not being allowed to order more than 200 vacuum tubes at a time. It was a different story on the Data Processing side. Their new 705 Model III was an all vacuum tube machine with the new 729 Model III tape units. These tape units were transistorized and the first to use a pinch roller device called a Prolay. The Prolay hit the field with two problems that had not shown up in product test.
The first problem was there was not enough travel on the Prolay arm to get a good bite on the capstan rubber. The least bit of wear on any of the moving parts would cause enough slop to prevent a good bite. This problem was solved by a CE named Herb Owens, at the Social Security Installation, in the Baltimore, MD office. He used some IBM card stock as a shim under the magnet assembly to increase the arm travel. Roy Dailey was the Baltimore Branch Office CE Manager at the time and he put so much pressure on Engineering to do something they released and Engineering Change for the shims. Herb was awarded a large suggestion award for his idea.
The second problem was the Prolay armature pivot would seize up if it was not cleaned and lubricated once a week in a high use system. This was caused by something new to us called “Fretting Corrosion”. This would occur on a shaft that had a bearing that rocked back and forth and didn’t rotate enough to spread the lubrication around the shaft. To lubricate the pivot you had to remove both Prolays from each tape drive and disassemble it. The only reason the Prolay had to be removed from the drive and disassembled to get to the armature pivot was a large hump on the armature around the pivot hole. After cleaning and lubricating it had to be reassembled and installed on the drive. Then all the adjustments had to be checked. This was causing such high maintenance the 705 crew referred to their work week as, Monday, Tuesday, Prolay, Thursday and Friday. This problem was also solved later on by a CE in the New Orleans, LA office. He worked at the Cotton Agency 705 III installation and also won a big suggestion award.
About this time Roy Dailey was promoted from the Baltimore Branch CE manager to the District 7 CE manager. Wally Stewart replaced Herb Harris as the Atlanta Branch Office Manager. After their first meeting with the Lockheed manager and getting raked over the coals about all the machine troubles we were having Roy decided to bring Herb Owens down to Lockheed to look around and advise him. Herb came down and looked through the logs and EC history but wouldn’t talk to anyone. We all wondered what was going on. One day he was out looking at the 705 and had one of the Plexiglass covers over the vacuum tubes off the machine. For some reason he decided to twist on of the tubes and the socket rotated and shorted the filament wires to the frame of the pluggable unit and the whole 705 system powered down. It took the local CEs several hours to replace all the blown parts and get the system back up. Herb’s response was to say, “It’s a good thing I did that as that wire was probably going to short out sometimes anyway”. That went over like a lead balloon with everyone. I said I was going to remember that saying in case I ever caused a system to shut down. Several years later when the 7080 had been installed and the CEs were trying to find an intermittent bug they were vibrating the SMS cards by gently tapping on the end of the card with their finger. Having had several years experience on the 7090 I told them, “Let me show you how to do that”. I took one of the black plastic dummy cards from the gate and raked it across the edge of one row of cards. The system immediately powered off. I did not know that the 7080 Double-wide SMS cards did not have the insulator to keep them from touching like the 7090 cards had. I remembered what Herb Owens had said and repeated it. It did no good as they threw me out of the room until they got the system back up.
Herb made his report to Roy Dailey and his big complaint was the big backlog of EC’s that had not been installed on the 729 tape drives on the 705. The reason they had not been installed was the customer would not give up the machines long enough to install them. Bill Holland the Supervisor over the 705 crew had made several requests to see if he could get a spare 729 from IBM long enough to get the changes installed but that request always stopped at Manry Amos the Branch Office CE Manager. None of the uninstalled changes actually had anything to do with the performance of the drives. All the 729s on the 7090 had all the ECs installed because we could get a drive any time we wanted it.
Herb also made a big deal about the 729s on the 705 not having erase heads installed. That’s because the drive was designed without one and no EC was ever written to install one. The theory was that the write head segments were wider than the read head segments so no erase head was needed. The theory sounded good but the fact was a piece of trash as small as a cigarette ash could lift the write head off the tape and leave some bits on the tape. This was really bad when it occurred in the inter-record gap. It really confused the tape control unit.
Roy Dailey got on the phone and was able to get a 729 that had been sent to the plant after a mechanical replacement. It was a real dog but the local crew soon had it working good enough to put on the 705 and pull one off for EC work.
Herb went around and around with people in the plant until they agreed to work up a temporary erase head EC to see if it would work. The parts were shipped and all the ECs were installed. Herb went back to Baltimore and it was about this time I heard from one of the Lockheed managers that I had a close working relationship that IBM was going to replace Bill Holland as the Supervisor and blame everything on him. The decision had already been made and they were looking for a replacement. The rest of the day I agonized over whether I should tell Bill what I knew or not. I finally decided that if I was in his place and someone knew what I knew I would want him to tell me so I could plan my response. That night I called Bill and told him what I knew and who told me. He said he was really glad I had called because he knew something was going on but didn’t know what.
On Friday there was a meeting of the group at Lockheed with Wally Stewart and Manry Amos to announce Bill Holland’s promotion to the Poughkeepsie Plant’s Technical Operations Dept. as a SPR (Service Planning Representative). After the announcement there was a little pep talk by Wally to tell us not to get in a situation like that again.
I have always wondered what my career would have been like if I had not been at that meeting. There was really no reason for me to be there (I didn’t work for Bill or on the 705) except it was held in the CE room and I was there. For some strange reason I made the remark that there would have been no reason to be in that situation to begin with if the 705 crew had been given everything that was given to a stranger from out of town. Wally pulled out his little think pad and pen and said, “Tell me what you mean”. I mentioned the extra tape drive and the 200 limit on tube orders. Some of the others joined in with a few items and Wally had a page of notes when the meeting was over.
Saturday afternoon I received a phone call from dispatch telling me that Manry Amos wanted to see me in his office the first thing Monday morning and for me to bring my tool bag. I knew I was in trouble because I was already on Manry’s list because of something I had said before. When Mr. Bill Gerkin was Vice President of Customer Engineering he paid a visit to the customers at Lockheed. After the meeting with them he came to the CE room to be introduced to the CEs. He saw the tube tester that I had built and I explained why I built it and how it worked. The CEs told him how well it worked and how much time it saved us. He turned to me and said, “How would you like to go to Poughkeepsie and work in Engineering”? The thought of living the rest of my life in Poughkeepsie was so horrible the part about working in Engineering didn’t even register in my brain at the time. I told him, “I would rather die and go to Hell”. When I saw the shocked look on everyone’s face I realized what I had said and explained what I meant. As soon as Gerkin left the room Manry came back in and told me, “That was no way to talk to a Vice President”.
Monday morning I was waiting at Manry’s office when he arrived. He told me the reason I was there was he was going to teach me a lesson. He was transferring me from the Lockheed group to Atlanta and I would be working for Brawnson Ayers. I didn’t know what would be worse working on card machines in Atlanta or working for Brawnson. I knew I would not do either for very long. I asked what it was that I said that had him so upset and he told me it wasn’t what I said but the way I said it. Bryan Rowland told me later that what he meant by that was I said it loud enough for someone else to hear. I was told I would not have an assigned territory but to just take the calls dispatch sent me. I found out later from one of the Dispatchers that Manry had told them to sent me all the keypunch and verifier calls that came in. Manry told me if my attitude straightened out he would consider sending me back to Lockheed. I asked him how long that might be and he said that under no circumstance would I be going back in less than three months. I left his office and began taking keypunch calls. Fortunately I had worked on keypunches and verifiers at Lockheed enough that I could fix them, but it was very boring after working on the 704 so much. I spent most of my time thinking and taking stock of my career at that time. I was sure Manry was trying to make me quit because he would have to build a case before he could fire me and this was just the first step. I had 5 ½ years with IBM and I didn’t want to waste them. I also had a wife and two children I had to support. I decided to play it day by day and do everything they asked me to do and see how that played out.
Meanwhile my supervisor John Abt had returned from vacation and heard that Manry had taken me out of his group without even talking to him. John was really upset about this and they had a big fuss. I was one of only two 7090 trained CEs at the time and the other broke more stuff than he fixed. John and Manry had so many words that Manry decided to replace both Bill Holland and John Abt with a new Field Manager over the whole Lockheed group. John was sent to Miami as the FE Account Representative. for the Eastern Airlines reservation system account.
I continued to take keypunch calls the first week and everyday when I got home I would get a lot of phone calls from the CEs at Lockheed and Lockheed people wanting to know what was happening. One of the Lockheed people told me that Dr. Ritter the head of the Math Analysis Department told all the programmers to try every program they had on the 7090 and if there was any trouble at all to turn a call in. By the end of the week there were so many unresolved problems the office brought Gene Satterfield over from Huntsville to help solve them. Every day the Lockheed management was beating up the IBM sales force to get me back out there. Sales was putting pressure on Customer Engineering. On Friday afternoon I was in the office to turn in some returnable parts and Manry saw me. He called me to his office and told me he was trying to salvage me. I remember thinking how I felt like a ship. First he torpedoed me and now he wants to salvage me.
About the middle of the second week of my keypunch punishment I got a call from one of the Lockheed managers inviting me to come over to his house that night to discuss the situation. When I arrived he told me that Lockheed was concerned that I may quit IBM and go to work for someone else before they had a chance at me. He said they would rather have me working for IBM at Lockheed but if they had to they would hire me. We discussed three jobs I might do for them. They were Machine Room Supervisor, Fortran Monitor Program Analyst and Utility Programs Programmer. I had already written some of the Tape Utility programs they were using on the 7090. We even got so far as to talk salary. He told me to put down my base salary plus my overtime and add $2000.00 a year to that. When he looked at the amount he said he might have trouble getting that much money for me as I didn’t have a degree. At that time before it was called Computer Science there was no degree I could get that had all the different skills I had at the time. I asked him, “If the Wright brothers came to Lockheed in the early 1900s and asked for a job, would you have said, “Sorry you don’t have a degree in Aeronautical Engineering”? He said, “With that kind of thinking I think I can get you the money”. I filled out a formal Lockheed application and gave it to him to hold.
When I started working for IBM In 1955 the first course on electronic digital computers was offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology, named Fundamentals of Digital Computers, and given by the math department two years before there was even a digital computer on the Georgia Tech campus.
I continued on keypunches until Friday morning when I received a phone call from a Lockheed manager. He told me that Dr. Ritter had just called the IBM office and told them to either get me back out there or to send a truck for that 7090. They had come up with a program that read cards and had enough compute time between cards that the 711 clutch would latch up then release immediately for the next cycle. The program was check summing the data from each card and getting errors.
Within two I hours I received a message to go to Manry Amos’s office. When I got there he started by telling me he had to convince me there was no animosity in what he had done to me. That really stumped me as I don’t think I had ever heard the word “animosity” before. I had to look it up when I got home. He told me the new Field Manager Al Broadwater had arrived and he was going to leave it up to Al if I went back to Lockheed. Al was called to the office and we were introduced. He had been one of the original CEs to install the first 7090 computers in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System). He had been presented to Roy Daily as a 7090 expert but I found out later that he was a cable puller and another CE shot all the bugs. Al wanted to know if I wanted to go back to Lockheed and I said yes. He said ok so I headed back to Lockheed. In two weeks Manry had gone from teaching me a lesson, salvaging me, to convincing me of no animosity. I had not seen Brawnson Ayers since the first day and figured he was just trying to stay out of the battlefield. A CE that once worked for him complained that he could not get an answer from him. He said, “If I ask him what time is it? He would reply, “Wa-wa-what time do you think it is”?
When I got to Lockheed Gene Satterfield was still working on the card reader problem he had been on for two days. I immediately recognized the card deck. We had the same problem with this deck on the 711 card reader on the 704 until I adjusted some rocker CBs to compensate for the windup in the gear train and shafts due to the sudden stop and startup of the clutch. This read feed had originally been designed for the 402 tabulator running at 100 cards per minute. When they increased the speed to 250 cards per minute in the 711 the CB shafts would actually wind up like a torsion spring and CBs on the far end of the shaft would be late in timing. It didn’t take long to fix the problem.
A few months later it was announced that Manry Amos was being promoted to CE Manager in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile was a much smaller office than Atlanta. Joe Sparks was promoted from the Miami, Florida office to CE Manager in Atlanta.
One day after this I was in the Branch Office and Wally Stewart saw me. He asked me to come into his office to talk awhile. He had a leather couch in his office and I noticed he had a Cedartown Bulldog cushion on the couch. Cedartown was the small Georgia town I was born in and went to high school through my sophomore year before moving to Griffin. Wally was from Cedartown also but neither of us knew this before. He told me what he wanted to talk to me about was the meeting where I told him Manry would not let us order more than 200 tubes at a time. Wally said he was visiting the customer at the General Motors Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac assembly plant in Doraville, GA when he saw the CE Byron Thompson working on the 305 RAMAC. When he asked Byron what was wrong with the RAMAC he told him it had a bunch of weak tubes in it. When Wally ask him why he didn’t replace them Byron told him Manry would not let him order enough tubes to do it. Wally went to several other installations that had computers and was told the same thing. Wally said Manry had told him what I had said at Lockheed was not true. He said to me, “There I was a new branch manager in Atlanta and a CE tells me one thing and the CE Manager tell me another, who am I to believe”? After that Wally and I always had good two way communications. He would tell other people I was the only one allowed to sit on his Cedartown Bulldog cushion.
I learned a lot from this episode in my career. One thing was to never go to a meeting you don’t have to. If you are not there you can’t get into trouble saying the wrong thing. It also had an effect on my future financial dealings. Six months before I had bought my wife a new 1959 Buick Electra for her anniversary present. Up until that time we were a one car family with my 1953 Ford. IBM required me to have a car at work even though I seldom ever left Lockheed. Joyce had to stay at home until I got off work. I had been saving all my overtime money but had to borrow $1500.00 to have enough to get the car. That really worried me until Lockheed made me the offer. I replaced all the overtime money in the bank and never bought another new car until I had the money to pay for it.