During my five years at Energy, Mines, and Resources there were two separate system support groups. One was called System Support (oddly enough) and the other one was me and one or two other people (it varied over time). We were called System Managers. The System Support team was responsible for the smooth running and maintenance of the CDC Cyber mainframes and an IBM mid-range onsite. We System Managers were responsible for the smooth running and maintenance of all the DEC VAX computers. System Support did not like or trust System Managers.
System Support required a staff of eight, plus a manager. System Management required, well, me. I reported to the head of operations. The Support team looked after a total of three machines. I looked after (at its peak) five machines. I also wrote all the programs required for maintenance and reporting, tape rentals, etc. Support did not write code; there was a separate department for that (of another eight or so individuals). I did all of the front line user support; the Support team did not do that either; there was a separate group (of six to eight under a different manager) who looked after that. In fact, I don't really know what they did other than have meetings.
So, we are talking of about 24 people to look after three machines (plus an operations staff of another eight for a total of 32). It took one person, plus an operator to mount tapes during non-office hours, for a total of two to look after five machines. The other one or two system managers I mentioned were not really necessary. They were more of a contingency plan in case I got hit by a bus or wanted to take some time off. The one junior system manager who stuck with me took over my position after I left the department.
I once asked a member of the support team what was so special about their backgrounds and he answered, "We can read Assembler." Well, so could I; in fact I wrote a few applications in Assembler. (Assembler is as close to machine language as humans can operate. The language itself is made up of instructions that are hard-wired into the CPU. You are talking directly to the machine in its language. Instructions use words like this: MOVC5, PUSHAQ, and CMPL. (The first few letters describe the nature of the operation, in other words which built-in circuits to use, and the latter letters describe the characteristics of the bytes to operate on. So, CMPL means, in English, "Compare two integer longwords (32 bits).") Did I mention that the support group did not write applications, in Assembler or otherwise?
Another time I asked a member of this team to define the word mainframe (it was a word they used frequently), and he told me that a mainframe was any machine that required water-cooling. A rather odd definition if you ask me because many mainframes at the time were air-cooled, just like my VAXes, and water-cooling was becoming obsolete.
To the point: it was decided to test the CDC Cybers, my VAXes, and the IBM mid-range to compare their computational speeds. The test required both text manipulation and mathematics operations. We all agreed. After the tests were run, the results were tabulated and printed up in the in-house newsletter. As expected, the Cybers solidly out-performed the other machines when it came to mathematics. But, the VAX was faster than the IBM system. The IBM came out ahead when it came to manipulating text, with the Cybers a very distant third. I was not surprised; VAXes stood between the two extremes, doing a decent-enough job in both text and mathematics. So, it was published. The Support team as ecstatic because their machine had out-performed the VAX when you took all of the factors into consideration.
...and then, someone discovered an error in their calculations. A decimal point was two places out of position. When corrected, it turned out that the VAX had actually performed 100 times faster than the IBM system.
There was no retraction published and the Support team put the Cone of Silence over the entire project. After a while they denied that any such test had taken place.
This story is important because similar events were happening around the world as Computer Experts desperately fought a losing battle to keep their mainframes a going concern. There were more myths going around about VAXes and their operating system, VMS, than there were stories in all the children's books in existence. Unfortunate, because a great company was eventually driven out of business. The descendants of the VAXes and their operating system are now owned by HP. They are still the most reliable computers available. I read that VAXes survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and were still operational after being dug out of the ruble.
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