The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

I'd forgotten how close to printing machines the old photocopiers were. You would basically either have a crap one you could operate yourself, or take your stuff to the printery to have professionals (a subset of librarians I think, or the logical join over librarians and computer operations staff) do it for you. Printing machines had a fleet of maintainers, craft unions who walked off the job if you touched a dial.

They were amazing at doing things which really mattered: shrinking an A0 architectural drawing down but maintaining aspect ratio. Adjusting offsets for the print for binding signatures, so the 1st and 16th page was not too far out because of wrapping around the other 8 pairs of pages. Even just working out how to rotate the pages for N-up printing. But the GUI sucked. I think they called ours "the bindery" because it's main gig was doing PHD from soup to nuts, binding included.

The repair techs had the most amazing flight cases, packed with tools which served one specific purpose.Like, A doohickey to adjust the corona wire, without dismantling the imaging and toner roller, with a tonne of equipment hovering over your head on a gas-lift. Screwdrivers with very very carefully chosen lengths. Torque wrenches. It was high tech meets motor racing meets.. IBM.

I am told they were paid better than many computer techs. The IBM guy was paid IBM scale to fix it on IBMs timescales. the xerox guy did more random shit, with more devices, more often.

They had a very corporate look. that amazing briefcase or six. Suit, tie. Very acceptable.

I know a guy who worked for a paper-folding-and-envelope-stuffing company and it was very similar culturally: can-do, fix anything, but working on giant multi-million dollar machines which were used twice a year to do tax mailouts, and election materials, and the rest of the time rented to the original spam merchants for 10c per thousand mailouts. The secondhand value of these machines were like photocopiers: Really significant. He was brought out of retirement to help take one apart into TEU equivalent chunks to be shipped to Singapore from Brisbane. His retirement gig at one point was repairing Espresso machines, he said it made him feel familiar and useful.

The era which was the end of the typing pool was fascinating. All kinds of arcane roles which only make sense in the absence of email and tiny printers everywhere. Some of those jobs had been there from the days of hand-copying, Dickens-era and before.

This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it.

I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came from ignorance.*

To be fair, I was not the only one: the insights described in this book draft surprised a lot of people, not just how they improved the copiers but how those two even approached the problem (starting with the sociology of the repair workers). It sure surprised Xerox management. But I’ve heard it said many times that this work led to restructuring the paper path in a way that justified (paid for) everything spent on PARC.

I did grow up of course and now do see my work (machines, chemistry, etc) as a small part of a large social system. A successful company has to base its product plans starting this way.

To choose an example of failure to appreciate the social scope (but not pick on it) the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? Xerox was the same, and it helped them sell a lot of copiers, but didn’t make them as ubiquitous as they could have been. Another example: everybody laughs at Google for launching “products” that go nowhere and are quickly forgotten. We all know it’s because of a screwed-up, internally-focused culture. But sometimes a product succeeds without marketing (e.g. gmail, at the time) because it happened to be matched to the actual, external need. It makes this kind of continuous failure even more damning.

* TBH, 40 years later I have not 100% shed this view — e.g. my attitude towards complaints about git. Maybe this means I’m still a jerk.

Reference - a great read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

The latter half has a lot of criticism of allegedly boneheaded management (from the perspective of the writer and researchers they quote).

This passage particularly struck me: He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported. “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”

On a related note, I'd like to highly recommend Lucy Suchman's work, mentioned in this article as Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, but the updated version now called Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. The new version has several extra chapters and some other revisions. I've read it several times, and had my mind blown each time.

What the...

I open the article and it is not about "maintaining" the old Data General and DEC machines (the original "The Should of a New Machine" was about the race to create the first 32-bit minicomputer --between DG and DEC. DG was a former group of DECies --spoiler: THEY LOST! It was a hell of a lot more worthy a battle than Qualcomm vs Apple, which is almost the same situation.) The old XEROX machines were boring as they competed with IBM in the business space whereas DG and DEC were more focused on Science and Engineering. The XEROX Star was pretty cool, but not nearly as cool as History has recorded it to be (apparently because Steve Jobs, who later became an icon of sorts himself, once saw a demo and rushed to recreate it using microprocessors in his poorly implemented Lisa/Mac system). I developed on all of these machines (though I only used the Star to write documentation for my VMS internals code hahah) and these are MY opinions.

I spent nearly 20 years fixing computers and other electronics. Repair techs are my original work tribe and it was a fun if sometimes stressful way to make a living. I got away from it because the money went away. That said, I never wanted to fix copiers. They were always finicky, messy and dirty, but this is a really great piece and three things stand out for me.

The article claims that PARC paid for itself (1) through the anthropological sociological studies of copier repair technicians which revealed shortcomings in the engineering of the copiers and resulted in changes to the paper path and handling in newer designs and significantly reduced maintenance cost and difficulty. Two, enabling information sharing between repair technicians over radios and technician created and maintained documentation, saved the company 5-8% of service cost and these innovations were resisted by services management which was invested in the idea that copier repair technicians should be cheap, interchangable monkeys. Three, Xerox management likely left significant money on the table because they fundamentally and willfully misunderstood copier repair and copier repair technicians and the value they were creating for the company. Likely, mostly because repair was seen as a cost center which in an ideal world would be eliminated entirely.

1. It's really astonishing how much and in how many ways PARC paid for itself and yet business literature and likely Xeroxes management often focuses on the money left on the table for others to grab and asserts there was a failure.

Though they were doing messy blue-collar work, Xerox required the technicians to act and dress white-collar. They carried their tools in a briefcase.

We don’t carry tools in briefcases because it makes us appear white collar, but because the shell is hard and protective, there are many sizes, and the boxy interior can be formed to however you like if you use foam and cut it to fit your tools. Briefcases fit readily into many tight spots for transportation. The photo shows the usual layout of tools that techs use. Companies sell high end equipment in briefcase-like containers because it keeps them safe and waterproof in needed situations.

Not a big fan of the anthropology aspect. It’s a job. Techies improvise, it’s not a clandestine operation to fix a machine.

Back in 1986 I worked for $BIG_BANK where we replaced humans, typewriters and carbon paper forms with Xerox laser printers (conveniently leapfrogging daisy wheel and dot-matrix technology). These beasts were the size of a large microwave oven, or maybe a small dorm fridge turned on its side, and I seem to remember them costing $6,000 but my memory is fuzzy and it may have been as much as $15,000.

Anyway, these printers were finicky, and I remember we were visited by the same two Xerox service techs on a regular basis. In addition to repairs, they were faced with the near impossible task of keeping the toner (which was dispensed by hand from a plastic container, similar to powdered clothing detergent) off their white shirts and ties. We saw those guys so often that even now, 38 years later, I still remember that one of them was named Randy.

I while ago (around 2010) I worked at Océ Technologies R&D and at least to me the machines while incredibly complex where quite easy to operate and maintain. In fact every developer was allowed to print their private stuff (non commercial) on the machines under development. I believe this really helped because we basically had to become operators and maintainers and got a feel of their roles. If you print something for yourself, family or friends you also take a better look at the output or sometimes have a very specific use case in mind.

This goes a long way in explaining the incredibly warm and sociable, yet undeniably peculiar Xerox tech that I would interact with on a regular basis. Despite him not actually working for the company, I would have to call him in constantly to get him to fix one or more of the machines we had in the office.

For what it's worth, there are two other chapters up. One is about round the world sailing. It is also worth a read.

I've not been able to get into the third chapter, but it looks equally interesting.