On 12/23/24 17:21, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, 2024-12-23 at 20:42 +0000, Wayne S via cctalk wrote:
For the people who worked at IBM, what was the difference between an
“FE” and “CE” ?
When my employer had a 7094/7044 Direct Couple, all the IBM guys who
worked on it were called "CE" for "Customer Engineer." When it was
replaced with Univac 1108, all the guys who worked on it were called
"FE" for "Field Engineer." I never heard the IBM guys called FE, or the
Univac guys called CE.
I don't know if there was a difference, but at our school, when we
ordered and later took delivery of a 360/50 (purchased), IBM called up
the local Selectric repair guy (his primary duty at the time) and
shipped him to school to service our systems. We had a 360/40 from
about 68 till the /50 was delivered in about 1970. So he had to fix
both. It speaks volumes that a typewrite repairman could move to
servicing a system like the 360 with the training provided by IBM.
And how good he was at it. Worth noting that the console, 1052 was
always running perfectly.
He was our "CE" and I don't think he had any other systems to service.
We were in Rolla, Mo about 80 miles from St Louis so not practical to
call him up for routine calls.
He continued servicing all other IBM products when not working on the /50.
The later experience we had we didn't have a term for the IBM
personnel. Our service on a number of IBM systems was much more we fix
and IBM come in seldom. We had a 4381 and a 9221 as well as two 9370s.
We did not have much hardware issues in the way of faults or the like
IBM expected us to handle all aspects of configuration and the like as
we were supporting an IBM approved third party operating system which
required testing in various configurations that our and later their
customers would encounter.
The system was Ultimate Pick on the mainframe, and ran directly on the
hardware, or in our case for development on VM and VM/ESA. We had it
configured to be bootable if need be on both the bare machine as well as
under VM for each developer.
But when the IBM guys showed up it was typically for larger jobs. For
instance we upgraded to the 9221 and they shipped in an upgrade kit and
installed it for us.
And periodically they'd have to work on our tape drives which were 3420s.
thanks
Jim
