Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

With only BASIC knowledge to fall back on, and a typing pool in tears, the OFF switch looked very attractive

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that tells your stories of tech support jobs performed under stress, duress, and all sorts of mess.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Walter," a mechanical engineer who took us back to the 1980s, just a few weeks after he had treated himself to a BBC Microcomputer.

The machine was for personal use only because at the time Walter was not an IT pro – just a chap who fancied getting up to speed with new tech.

His employer also liked to explore the latest digital doodads, having just adopted a mainframe-based word processing system that saw the typing pool suddenly migrate from typewriters to terminals.

For those of you who have forgotten about typing pools, they were a group of staff who took handwritten or dictated documents and typed them onto sheets adorned with company letterheads.

At Walter's company, it took a day or two before a scrawled submission returned from the typing pool. The typists were struggling to adapt to the mainframe system.

I was being stared at by a dozen sets of pleading eyes

A couple of weeks into the new world of word processing, the typists' supervisor called Walter and asked if he could come in for an urgent chat.

Walter did as requested and, upon arrival, was questioned about whether he had just bought a BBC Micro.

He replied that he had, at which point the supervisor asked if Walter could explain why the word processing terminals had all locked up.

"I could feel a panic attack settling in," Walter told On Call. "I was a mechanical engineer with no IT knowledge beyond a few weeks with a BBC Micro. I was being stared at by a dozen sets of pleading eyes who wanted me to fix a giant lump of dead-in-the-water kit the size and cost of which only a company as huge as IBM could have supplied."

Even the mainframe's manuals were dauntingly large and Walter despaired of being able to find a fix in their pages. "Then I remembered one thing I had learned from my BBC Micro," he told On Call.

The microcomputers of the early 1980s were infamously flaky. Even a few weeks with the machines could impart knowledge about the little hacks and tricks needed to keep them running.

"I asked if everybody had backed up their work so far and, after receiving positive replies, I popped through the door to the mainframe and turned it off."

Walter then counted to ten and turned it on again. "Back in the main office, the happy, smiling faces told me that my 'fix' had worked."

He later learned that mainframes are generally not designed to be power cycled like personal computers, and that he had been extremely lucky!

What's the most outrageous assumption that's been made about your tech skills? We'll assume that you know clicking here means a mailto link will open your preferred email client and pre-populate a message to On Call that you can use to send us your story. Do so, please, so we can consider your story for a future edition of On Call. ®