IBM
0203 IBM Relocation Group
Following my damaging battle with PC Group, IBM had to find somewhere to place me. Accordingly I was tossed back to Derek Haslam once more. Derek was at that time the head of the Basingstoke location, which had been designated to be the marketing centre for the whole of IBM United Kingdom. Within a matter of four or five years, though, the whole project was abandoned and different structure was put place -- leaving Basingstoke out on a limb. At that time, however, it was relocating something like two and a half thousand people to a range of buildings across Basingstoke. Under Derek, there was a manager heading up the team, Alan, who had been previously had been in admin. I was really rather an anomaly in this team, but I got on with the work and quite enjoyed it. My specific responsibility was, paradoxically, moving PC group into a dedicated new building.
In essence this meant that I became the client of the IBM Estates Group, who were fitting out the building. It had been spec-built, but the cabling provision had been found to be of a poor standard not the high standard claimed. From IBM’s point of view, it was supposed to be good enough for the future requirements, not just those of the day. Accordingly, it had been assumed, by myself as well as everyone else, that computerising every workstation would mean that less space would be required. In reality it turned out that the space needed, was more than doubled. Thus, instead of the ordinary desk, the new workstation had to provide space for the PC keyboard as well as printer. This, by itself, added 50% to the footprint of every desk. In addition we had to provide fast printer rooms. The fast printers, in those days, made an enormous amount of noise, since they were impact printers. As a result they had to be screened from everyone working in the main areas. In addition a number of service rooms had to be located, where the network service connected all the PCs to the network. Finally there was a large computer room which provided the interface with the rest of IBM.
All that was bad enough, but the new requirement was that people also had to communicate, face-to-face, with each other. Accordingly there were a significant number of conference rooms to be provided, as well as conference areas amongst the workstations. All in all space required was at least 50% higher than in a normal office building; and even higher than our own very pessimistic estimates!
To further complicate matters, the building was wired through troughs in the floor. The spec builder had thought that these would have provided ample capacity for all future years of DP use. In fact, they proved inadequate for even the start of our own operations, and we had to hang cable trays from the ceiling over the various workstations. Needless to say, being IBM, these were very elegant cable trays, with built-in lighting etc, but they were still an intrusion.
Indeed, IBM generally underestimated the amount of the network support needed. It had originally been reckoned that the new UK network would need five TP mainframes to control communications between the various sites. It actually had to install something like 50 of these mainframes with hundreds of megastream lines between them. I remember, at the time, Basingstoke seemed to be full of BT teams pulling new cables. Almost every roundabout had a BT van sitting on it!
It also meant that the very sophisticated IBM 3750 telephone exchange was found to be inadequate, and a specially upgraded system had to be built which could handle all the traffic.
There were also some especially interesting DP experiences while I was in the job. Thus, IBM decided that it wanted to test its fallback position in terms of its back-up equipment. The idea was that, in an emergency, IBM could switch to a backup system and be on the air again in less than 24 hours. Accordingly they decided to test this. Unfortunately, despite the fact that everyone knew exactly when the system was due to crash, it took nearly a week to get the system back up again. This was embarrassing in terms of service within IBM, and it left it us wondering just how long they would take if the disaster hit unexpectedly!
The other story was that the whole of the worldwide computer network, which linked the factories, was brought down for more than a day by a simple problem. The system, down at Portsmouth, had backup at every possible level. It had backup mainframes, memory backup, and extra power supplies. Unfortunately, the mainframes were water-cooled and the cooling towers for this were some distance; away connected by a single underground channel. This became blocked by weeds, and the resultant lack of cooling brought the whole system down. Thus, IBM's marvellous worldwide computer network had to be rescued by frogmen swimming through this channel cutting out the weeds. This, for me at least, provided a nice picture of the frailty of some modern technology.
There were other problems. One day the system wiped everyone's diaries, which were held on the computer. This meant that nobody knew what they were doing for the next months; and the building was full of managers rushing backwards and forwards, like headless chickens, trying to establish what meetings should be in their diaries.
It was an interesting job, not least because I was also involved with a section of the laboratory which was sharing the same building. This meant I got inside the actual lab. In fact, like most IBM laboratories, it was just an office building where the labs had rather more powerful desktop computers connected to very powerful mainframes.
The only real hang-up in the fitting out of the new building was the lighting. The architects wanted very trendy pools of light, concentrated only on the desks. I thought that this would not be bright enough and proper working conditions also required overall lighting as well. I was overruled. I was overruled, that was, until I brought the environmental people in to test the light levels. The resulting light levels were, in fact, below the legal limit. It cost £50,000 in extra lighting
I found the whole process of snagging quite enjoyable. I don't know why, but it was a bit of the detective mystery looking for things which were wrong and needed to be righted. I remember Derek Haslam who had done much the same job for the GSD head office when it moved to the Basingstoke location, telling me that he found a situation whereby - if there was a fire - the people had to decide whether to escape or fight the fire; since the cupboard doors that hid the fire hoses, when opened, blocked the fire exits!
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