Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 1:22 PM <robert rooney> wrote:
Hi,
Sorry it’s taken so long for me to respond. Just came across your site again. It sure brings back a lot of good memories!!!
I started at Entrex in Burlington Mass in the summer of 1974 (summer job between jr and sr years of high school. I then went back to work for them in May 1975 and stayed until June 2000!!
Yup, Entrex to Nixdorf to Siemens Nixdorf and Siemens. They whole time working on the 280, 480, 600, 655 systems. Each a successor to the prior system.
Roles:
Summer 1974 assembling data scopes and recently introduced data terminals
May 1975 back to work in the wave solder room - a single person hell hole! If you can imagine, hot greasy, messy, etc.
That didn’t last long when a friend from the board test department started to show me TTL logic diagrams and I soon started troubleshooting circuits boards for many of the boards in the system and terminals down to the component level.
1977 Promoted to group leader of the data terminal assembly line – they wanted a tech to man the department because they were having too many failures in the field on new installs.
1979 Moved on to the ‘staging test dept’ where systems were configured with all the components (except the data terminals) the customer ordered and we would run them through tests, and alignments of tape and disk drives, etc. let them run a few days before moving them to the shipping dock. Aside from the mentioned systems I also got to work on the Nixdorf made systems we sold in the US: 8850 8860 8870 8890
1982 Moved the ‘national support group’ where I provided hardware support for the x80 600s and 8850 systems to the US customers.
1984 Moved to the software side of ‘national support group’ Supporting the DPEX operating system and some DIDOS o.s. DIDOS was the German version of DPEX.
1987 As Unix started to make inroads and customers no longer wanted proprietary systems DPEX was ported to UNIX as an application called DCPA. It ran on Siemens-Nixdorf RM risc based servers and also x86 servers – using SCO Unix, Unixware,
I had a big hand in developing the applications to convert the DPEX- based customer libraries (their editor programs) and data; output it all to tape and read it back into the Unix servers. There were hundreds of customers that needed this done.
1998 things started to slow down and they were actually letting people work from home at that time through a dial-up connection. Colleagues were laid off, etc. I was able to re-locate to my house.
I actually had two 8850s at my house and an array of Siemens PCs. X86 servers where shipped to my house for staging, installing DCPA, and creating conversion tapes.
June 2000 worked slowed and they were looking for volunteers for a lay off.
Oct start at Lucent which became Alcatel-lucent and then Nokia. Stayed until let go in Jan. 2018.
About 10 years ago I scrapped all the equipment.
Please feel free to fire away; I’ll try to answer anything I can.
Have a great day,
Bob
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