Comment on 'boardswapping' as part of the computer culture.

[Joe R.]

At 05:46 PM 10/26/05 -0400, you wrote:
>>   Actually I HAVE done the analysis (in APL yet!) and there definitely IS a
>> place for board swapping. Especially when you consider the down time of the
>> system and the cost of extra systems when you HAVE to have a system in
>> operation (specificly in Air Defense!)
>
>At AOL, downtime obviously did not harm too many people as a failure in a
>defense system, but sales took a beating. I forget the numbers, but for
>the router interfaces, hard down time was SO damaging to sales that in
>less than a minute, it would be cheaper just to buy a new interface ($18K 
>Cisco cards like loaded VIPs).
>
>William Donzelli
>aw288 at osfn.org
>
>

   You're right. The last place that I worked before returning to college
was a relatively small food processing plant. We had three lines there and
it cost $600 per hour per line when they were down. It only takes a few
seconds to swap circuit cards so we had plenty of spare cards. After the
line was up and running we took the cards back to the shop and repaired
them at our leisure. I made them REAL happy when I build some test fixtures
so that we could test and adjust the cards in the shop. After that we could
just pop out the old card and drop in a new one and the adjustments were
close enough that everything worked with no futher adjusting.

  Joe