[Joerg]

Rich Grise wrote:
[snip]
My favorite perfboard was the Vectorbord 8813 or something like that -
pad-per-plated-thru-hole on one side, and "ground plane" (with a void
around each perf hole, so no shorts) on the other. I haven't been able
to find them on Vector's website. )-;

Maybe nobody prototypes by hand any more.

This may be your lucky day. I bought something like that a couple years
ago, but from Twin Industries. The CEO of that client was very surprised
they were still around because he remembered them from decades ago.

http://www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30
Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)

Oh, BTW, Digikey has it.

Any cheaper?

Well, I don't know, my clients prefer to order just about anything
there. Except salt and pepper shakers, those get ordered at McMaster.

 

[Jim Thompson]

Jim Thompson wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:
[snip]
My favorite perfboard was the Vectorbord 8813 or something like that -
pad-per-plated-thru-hole on one side, and "ground plane" (with a void
around each perf hole, so no shorts) on the other. I haven't been able
to find them on Vector's website. )-;

Maybe nobody prototypes by hand any more.

This may be your lucky day. I bought something like that a couple years
ago, but from Twin Industries. The CEO of that client was very surprised
they were still around because he remembered them from decades ago.

http://www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30
Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)

What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?

G-job is American vernacular for personal projects fudged on company
time:

Ok, I never did that ;-)

IR repeater.

It's _still_ not done? Man, don't make a science project out of it

I may have to whip up a new antenna mast amp this Saturday. Meanin' no
margaritas until I'm back off da ladder.

Antenna? What's that? I have a Channel Plus 8-output distribution
amplifier plus a couple of Tru-Spec Channel 4 notch filters to get me
600 channels of cable plus distribute anything originating in the
great room to any other set (5) in the house.

The IR repeater is to allow me to control the great room cable box and
DVD player from my office ;-)

I'll get to it in a week or so... I have the IR PD's and emitters
in-hand... just need to finish a paying project first ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food

 

[Joerg]

Jim Thompson wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:
[snip]
My favorite perfboard was the Vectorbord 8813 or something like that -
pad-per-plated-thru-hole on one side, and "ground plane" (with a void
around each perf hole, so no shorts) on the other. I haven't been able
to find them on Vector's website. )-;

Maybe nobody prototypes by hand any more.

This may be your lucky day. I bought something like that a couple years
ago, but from Twin Industries. The CEO of that client was very surprised
they were still around because he remembered them from decades ago.

http://www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30
Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)

What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?
G-job is American vernacular for personal projects fudged on company
time:

Ok, I never did that ;-)

IR repeater.

It's _still_ not done? Man, don't make a science project out of it

I may have to whip up a new antenna mast amp this Saturday. Meanin' no
margaritas until I'm back off da ladder.

Antenna? What's that? ...

It's them thar errials on da ruff.

... I have a Channel Plus 8-output distribution
amplifier plus a couple of Tru-Spec Channel 4 notch filters to get me
600 channels of cable plus distribute anything originating in the
great room to any other set (5) in the house.

Cable? That's maybe what this whole DTV switch was about, to get people
to succumb and buy cable service. Nope, first I'll try to get DTV to
work more reliably. Analog was sooo much better.

All we need is the news and the occasional movie. The news station
produces a nice square block of spectrum on the analyzer here but
multipath is what kills it. Just like I had predicted years ago.

The IR repeater is to allow me to control the great room cable box and
DVD player from my office ;-)

I'll get to it in a week or so... I have the IR PD's and emitters
in-hand... just need to finish a paying project first ;-)

Yes, those take first spot.

 

[krw]

Rich Grise wrote:
[snip]
My favorite perfboard was the Vectorbord 8813 or something like that -
pad-per-plated-thru-hole on one side, and "ground plane" (with a void
around each perf hole, so no shorts) on the other. I haven't been able
to find them on Vector's website. )-;

Maybe nobody prototypes by hand any more.

This may be your lucky day. I bought something like that a couple years
ago, but from Twin Industries. The CEO of that client was very surprised
they were still around because he remembered them from decades ago.

http://www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30

Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)

What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?

G-job is American vernacular for personal projects fudged on company
time:

AKA "Swiss Navy job".

 

[Jim Thompson]

Jim Thompson wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:
[snip]
My favorite perfboard was the Vectorbord 8813 or something like that -
pad-per-plated-thru-hole on one side, and "ground plane" (with a void
around each perf hole, so no shorts) on the other. I haven't been able
to find them on Vector's website. )-;

Maybe nobody prototypes by hand any more.

This may be your lucky day. I bought something like that a couple years
ago, but from Twin Industries. The CEO of that client was very surprised
they were still around because he remembered them from decades ago.

http://www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30

Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)


What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?

G-job is American vernacular for personal projects fudged on company
time:

AKA "Swiss Navy job".

IR repeater.

There you go ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food

 

[krw]

Thanks Phil... I guess Gerstner must have gone to "contemporary" business
school!

I suppose to give the man credit, he did manage to keep IBM going. It seems
like IBM was very much in the same group as Tek and HP, having all somewhat
lost their way in the late '80s/early '90s.

Yes, Gerstner saved the company after Akers did his best to drown it.
In the late '80s IBM was borrowing money to pay the dividend. By '93
the story is that they were 2 weeks from missing payroll. It was
ugly, but the company survived.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

A G-job is short for a Government job, so named because in those days of
cost-plus-fixed-fee government contracts, an elephant was a mouse built on a
cpff (pronounce see-piff).

I built some pretty nice Cessna parts while on a NASA cpff contract.

Jim

They still exist. When you only build one or two of a large system,
they are usually bid on a quote that uses previous data to qualify cost
estimates.

Today is mostly COGS though plus the quote for the job to put the COGS
together and form a GEARBOX (no meaning).

So COGS and Labor on a lot of stuff, but SeaPuff is likely still a
bidding model in some circles. SeaPuff go... SeaPuff go really fast!

They have water spikes that take out undersea mines now fired from a
helicopter. How cool is that?

 

[Joerg]

Yes, Gerstner saved the company after Akers did his best to drown it.
In the late '80s IBM was borrowing money to pay the dividend. By '93
the story is that they were 2 weeks from missing payroll. It was
ugly, but the company survived.

Because they clung to the mainframe architecture and proprietary
techniques for too long. The writing was on the wall, and they'd written
it on there themselves by introducing the XT. Just like GM. They
introduced the EV-1 a long time ago, then pulled back out for whatever
reason. If there really was a reason other than lack of corporate
guidance. Now they are teetering on the edge and Toyota eats their
lunch, building partially electric vehicles.

 

[krw]

You're an idiot. Plutonium is a retard that posts in sci.physics.

An entirely different idiot,

Well, Dimbulb, you said it.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Well, Dimbulb, you said it.

Yes, and you missed entirely, the target of the reference, as usual.

 

[Joerg]

Brr. I remember it vividly.

IBM went from being the world's most profitable company in 1990 to
losing something like $8 billion in 1992--which was real money back
then. It was really hard for an executive to be the one to say that
the emperor had no clothes, because you could easily lose your place on
the golden escalator. Nobody did, until too late.

1992 was a very strange time. (It's important to remember that IBM had
never had a layoff in the 78 years of its existence.) ...

They did, at least in Europe. It just wasn't called a lay-off. What they
did was a massive buy-out of older engineers. I know this from very
close family, if you want to know more about it I'll send a PM.

... After the
departure of John Akers and Jack Kuehler, on whose watch Humpty fell off
the wall, the new bean-counter-in-chief announced the following program:

(1) Your budgets are being cut by some unspecified (but large) amount in
each of the next N years;
(2) Depreciation (formerly paid from a corporate bucket) now comes out
of your department budget--the same one your salaries come out of;

That is the way it always should have been. And was, in other companies.

(3) We have this $8 billion pot of money to use to write stuff off against.

Loss tenders are always nice if you can turn a company around, after the
turn-around.

That put all the line managers in a cleft stick--basically, they could
either keep their stuff or their people, but not both. It resulted in
an absolute orgy of crushing new equipment--the good stuff that
(unfortunately) had book value. The amount of waste and destruction
that occurred was really monumental, and it was all for purely
accounting reasons. In principle it could have been sold off, but in
reality there was far too much stuff, and it was far too specialized, so
it almost all got sent to the crusher. As one example that I know
about, crushing a brand new $2M custom copper deposition tool delayed
the introduction of copper metallization in CMOS by at least a year, and
perhaps more. The line managers weren't at fault--what's the use of a
building full of shiny equipment with nobody to run it?--but it was an
obscene waste, which offended me very deeply.

Wow. That can make a grown man cry.

Being young and foolish (and the son of an obsessively honest CEO type)
I stood up on my hind legs in front of several hundred people and asked
the new CFO to explain why it was a good idea to crush all this new
equipment. He answered, 'I hope we aren't doing that.' (Whoops.) You
could have heard a pin drop in that auditorium. He subsequently
unleashed a few dozen auditors on IBM Microelectronics and IBM Research.
I had asked because I genuinely wanted to know, but I sure kept my head
down for a couple of years after that! (To the great credit of my
immediate management, I got in zero trouble for that piece of naivete.)

It's certainly true that they had to stop the bleeding, and in general I
think Gerstner did a very good job--much better than his predecessor or
his successor--but those perverse incentives did a lot of short-term
damage, and also set in motion the destruction of the company's culture,
which unfortunately is now nearly complete. It was a great place once,
and I was very lucky to be there.

Short-term objectives and incentives have crushed many places. I had to
live by MBO rules, too, but preferred to sacrifice part of a bonus and
not stick it to the company. For example, when an overly aggressive
inventory reduction would have come at the risk of major line-stop
situations. So I didn't reduce there.

 

[ehsjr]

Brr. I remember it vividly.

IBM went from being the world's most profitable company in 1990 to
losing something like $8 billion in 1992--which was real money back
then. It was really hard for an executive to be the one to say that
the emperor had no clothes, because you could easily lose your place on
the golden escalator. Nobody did, until too late.

1992 was a very strange time. (It's important to remember that IBM had
never had a layoff in the 78 years of its existence.) After the
departure of John Akers and Jack Kuehler, on whose watch Humpty fell off
the wall, the new bean-counter-in-chief announced the following program:

(1) Your budgets are being cut by some unspecified (but large) amount in
each of the next N years;
(2) Depreciation (formerly paid from a corporate bucket) now comes out
of your department budget--the same one your salaries come out of;
(3) We have this $8 billion pot of money to use to write stuff off against.

That put all the line managers in a cleft stick--basically, they could
either keep their stuff or their people, but not both. It resulted in
an absolute orgy of crushing new equipment--the good stuff that
(unfortunately) had book value. The amount of waste and destruction
that occurred was really monumental, and it was all for purely
accounting reasons. In principle it could have been sold off, but in
reality there was far too much stuff, and it was far too specialized, so
it almost all got sent to the crusher. As one example that I know
about, crushing a brand new $2M custom copper deposition tool delayed
the introduction of copper metallization in CMOS by at least a year, and
perhaps more. The line managers weren't at fault--what's the use of a
building full of shiny equipment with nobody to run it?--but it was an
obscene waste, which offended me very deeply.

Being young and foolish (and the son of an obsessively honest CEO type)
I stood up on my hind legs in front of several hundred people and asked
the new CFO to explain why it was a good idea to crush all this new
equipment. He answered, 'I hope we aren't doing that.' (Whoops.) You
could have heard a pin drop in that auditorium. He subsequently
unleashed a few dozen auditors on IBM Microelectronics and IBM Research.
I had asked because I genuinely wanted to know, but I sure kept my head
down for a couple of years after that! (To the great credit of my
immediate management, I got in zero trouble for that piece of naivete.)

It's certainly true that they had to stop the bleeding, and in general I
think Gerstner did a very good job--much better than his predecessor or
his successor--but those perverse incentives did a lot of short-term
damage, and also set in motion the destruction of the company's culture,
which unfortunately is now nearly complete. It was a great place once,
and I was very lucky to be there.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Were you there for the "buy out" in '88? Or the "belt tightening"
(hey, we're in trouble so we have to cut expenses, education budget,
lower salary increases etc) in '86 (I think) when they gave
33 to 36 % bonuses to the upper executives? Not that they compare
at the same level to what you mention. But they were
perhaps, writing on the wall.

Ed

 

[Rich Grise]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:24:37 -0700, Joerg wrote:

.... When I do designs in my consulting office the first thing

that happens is the writing of a rather large text document. Then as I
go into the schematics all the component specs are added as I go. Never,
ever, as a hindsight project. It's always "write-as-you-go".

Yeah, but you're a freak. ;-) ;-) ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich Grise]

What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?

Stuffing dollars into the stripper's G-string? ;-D

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Joerg]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:24:37 -0700, Joerg wrote:

... When I do designs in my consulting office the first thing

Yeah, but you're a freak. ;-) ;-) ;-)

The FDA, the FAA and others love us documentation-freaks. So do my
clients because my stuff usually just sails right on through

 

[Joerg]

//www.twinind.com/images/catalog/cat_pic_105.jpg[/URL]

The others they make:

http://www.twinind.com/catalog.php?id=7#sc30
Nice! Just what I've been looking for my "G-jobs" ;-)

What's a G-job? "G" as in grunt work?

Stuffing dollars into the stripper's G-string? ;-D

Ah, I see, you've been to such etablissement )

 

[Joerg]

We had buyouts over here, too, but the first couple were actually
voluntary. The first one especially was quite generous.

They rarely work for the company. In Europe they had to either offer it
to everyone above xx years old or to nobody. So they lost a lot of
crucial talent.

Depends. In semiconductor research you often have programs that are
very capital-intensive but don't need many people. Some of those
depreciation numbers were probably more than the total salaries of the
corresponding department. That makes for big distortions of incentives.

Simple fix, and we did that: Assign the corresponding share of revenue
to each department. When I sat at the negotiating table to do that for
the first time I anticipated a huge dog fight, major carnage. But it was
all very professional and it was over in less than one hour.

This allowed each division very business-like decision processes to see
how much automation makes sense. Of course I had to have a chat with our
CFO before plunking down a million bucks for some high-faluting machine.
But when he got the proper amortization calcs with the request he smiled
and signed.

Sure. Get all the bad news out of the way at once. But it doesn't help
anything in real life to destroy good equipment that you've already paid
for. IANAA, but I think they could probably have got the same
accounting effect by setting up a separate entity to own the capital
equipment, and dumping the $8B into that. Same accounting results, no
waste, and better profits due to better technology and much higher morale.

Yes, they should have done that. Didn't anybody consider this?

[...]

 

[krw]

Because they clung to the mainframe architecture and proprietary
techniques for too long. The writing was on the wall, and they'd written
it on there themselves by introducing the XT. Just like GM. They
introduced the EV-1 a long time ago, then pulled back out for whatever
reason. If there really was a reason other than lack of corporate
guidance. Now they are teetering on the edge and Toyota eats their
lunch, building partially electric vehicles.

They didn't have much choice. PCs were going to go mainstream whether
IBM did it or not. PCs paid for themselves as mainframe terminals,
alone. There was a time where IBM was in a cost crunch between
microprocessors and balls-to-the-wall ECL. Companies were done paying
$20M+ for a computer, but the technology wasn't there yet to make them
cheaper (it is now). IBM had to remake itself and it took Gerstner to
change IBM into a "services" company - and fast.

 

[krw]

Brr. I remember it vividly.

IBM went from being the world's most profitable company in 1990 to
losing something like $8 billion in 1992--which was real money back
then. It was really hard for an executive to be the one to say that
the emperor had no clothes, because you could easily lose your place on
the golden escalator. Nobody did, until too late.

Even in 1990 they were borrowing money to pay dividends. Something
like four of the five years before '93 they borrowed more money than
they paid in dividends. We even noted at the time that that was a
sure sign of trouble.

1992 was a very strange time. (It's important to remember that IBM had
never had a layoff in the 78 years of its existence.) After the
departure of John Akers and Jack Kuehler, on whose watch Humpty fell off
the wall, the new bean-counter-in-chief announced the following program:

"Humpty". Good word!

(1) Your budgets are being cut by some unspecified (but large) amount in
each of the next N years;
(2) Depreciation (formerly paid from a corporate bucket) now comes out
of your department budget--the same one your salaries come out of;
(3) We have this $8 billion pot of money to use to write stuff off against.

That put all the line managers in a cleft stick--basically, they could
either keep their stuff or their people, but not both. It resulted in
an absolute orgy of crushing new equipment--the good stuff that
(unfortunately) had book value. The amount of waste and destruction
that occurred was really monumental, and it was all for purely
accounting reasons. In principle it could have been sold off, but in
reality there was far too much stuff, and it was far too specialized, so
it almost all got sent to the crusher. As one example that I know
about, crushing a brand new $2M custom copper deposition tool delayed
the introduction of copper metallization in CMOS by at least a year, and
perhaps more. The line managers weren't at fault--what's the use of a
building full of shiny equipment with nobody to run it?--but it was an
obscene waste, which offended me very deeply.

Yep, this was taken to amazing extremes. There was a set of tools in
P'ok that were used to do overflows and EC wires to "Clarke boards",
basically 3'x5' or so, 100-layer PCBs that the logic modules plugged
into. These things stitched twisted pairs as EC wires. THere were a
pile of them in the basement of Bldg-1 in P'ok. In '92-'93 they got
rid of all but two, IIRC. That put them behind the 8-ball for making
these boards, but no matter. What was forgotten was that a couple of
these were specially modified and had the information to make
specialized boards. They too were tossed. There goes that product.

The stories about this stuff are endless.

Being young and foolish (and the son of an obsessively honest CEO type)
I stood up on my hind legs in front of several hundred people and asked
the new CFO to explain why it was a good idea to crush all this new
equipment. He answered, 'I hope we aren't doing that.' (Whoops.) You
could have heard a pin drop in that auditorium. He subsequently
unleashed a few dozen auditors on IBM Microelectronics and IBM Research.
I had asked because I genuinely wanted to know, but I sure kept my
head down for a couple of years after that! (To the great credit of my
immediate management, I got in zero trouble for that piece of naivete.)

I'd been around long enough by that time to know better than talk
about executive wardrobes.

It's certainly true that they had to stop the bleeding, and in general I
think Gerstner did a very good job--much better than his predecessor or
his successor--but those perverse incentives did a lot of short-term
damage, and also set in motion the destruction of the company's culture,
which unfortunately is now nearly complete.

That work was completed some time back. It's still not a bad place to
work, rather just another.

It was a great place once, and I was very lucky to be there.

Amen.

 

[krw]

They did, at least in Europe. It just wasn't called a lay-off. What they
did was a massive buy-out of older engineers. I know this from very
close family, if you want to know more about it I'll send a PM.

A buy-out is voluntary. There were many of those thru out the '80s.

That is the way it always should have been. And was, in other companies.



Loss tenders are always nice if you can turn a company around, after the
turn-around.



Wow. That can make a grown man cry.

I had a new (I bought it a year earlier) 6.5GHz HP spectrum analyzer
with a full set of calibrated EMI antennas sent to the crusher in '98.
The project was canceled and it happened to be in one of these
periods. A friend in research wanted it, but he couldn't take the
depreciation either, so it went to scrap.

<snip>