I remember seeing, in the 1970’s, computer tape drives in store front windows. Operators would have to go into the window display area to change tapes, making the entire thing a show (and they were wearing white shirts and ties, which is not a particularly good idea when working with equipment that has rapidly spinning parts). That’s what most people thought of when they thought of computers in those days. In fact, a drawing of an old-fashioned tape drive is still used to represent computers in cartoons today. Eventually IBM figured out that sunlight is very hard on plastic tape—in fact, leave it in the sun long enough and it will disintegrate—and so they moved the tape drives into air conditioned computer rooms where they belonged.
But those computer rooms, though nominally clean, were not the best place for disk drives and other highly sensitive equipment. The main problem with the old computer rooms is that they contained people—and people are, and were, the dirtiest things in such rooms. In the early days it took fairly large teams of people to keep computer systems functioning. Contrary to popular belief, most of the people in the computer rooms were not scientists or mathematicians; they were more likely to be high school grads with no particular skills other than a willingness to follow instructions and work through the night and on weekends. Being out of public view they dressed pretty much as they pleased under the lab coats that they wore (in order to protect them from ink in the printers and plotters, not because they were scientists).
When I began there were employees in the computer room who had been there for several years. They were full-fledged government employees protected by unions and a hierarchical system that rated seniority above ability. But, new employees did not receive that benefit; instead, they were hired as “term” employees, meaning they were not protected by the unions and their term of employment was limited (usually to six months, though such terms were regularly renewed.) It took me about a year to win full-time permanent status, but, most employees continued as terms for many years. I once remarked to my boss that I thought the reason that new employees were permanently on term (a slight contradiction in terms) was to prepare for the day when computers would not need so many humans attending on them. He agreed.
I was one of the ones working on the process to get people out of the noisy air-conditioned rooms, to leave the computers to look after themselves. I wrote a series of programs that did some of the routine monitoring that people used to do. Where the huge CDC Cybers and the midrange IBM system required dozens of people in constant attendance, my VAX VMS machines required only an operator to change tapes now and then. Everything else I set up as automated self-regulating systems. My purpose was never to put people out of work, but to free them from boring repetitive tasks that computers could handle on their own at far greater accuracy. People, I figured, would get more interesting jobs; for one, there was a shortage of programmers and software engineers.
Contracting-out expanded rapidly throughout the Mulroney years. Permanent employees are expensive. Besides medical benefits, long term disability, employer taxes, most employers then paid for pension plans. Unionized employees were even more expensive because you had to give them a severance package far better than what the law required—and you had to lay people off in order of seniority leaving you with a skeleton crew of the highest paid group of employees. By contracting-out services you avoid all that overhead. Companies bid to supply the services and you pay a predictable amount for the contract. Who the people are who are doing the actual work and what they are paid does not matter to you as long as they don’t screw up.
Another benefit was that the government could claim it had slashed so many jobs from the public service (always a popular move in the rest of the country). The fact that often those very same people would be back at the same jobs under a contracting arrangement was not mentioned. That accounts for the contradiction of fewer public employees but higher government expenditures. Every political party claims it intends to, or has, let thousands of people go, but, the numbers actually working in the public service keep growing. It’s just that most of them are not “employees;” they are “contractors”—and we don’t count those.
When the axe fell and almost two hundred people employed at the centre and in its support systems were let go, I moved on to a consulting firm. Because the firm I joined had won the contract to supply personnel to keep the computer-room going, I was asked for recommendations by my new private-business employers. For each of the former employees at the centre who I recommended they hire, I was paid $1,000. Not a bad deal from my point of view. (I think that my total was $7,000 in such “bonuses.”)
Because privately-owned companies are in the business of making money, the fewer people they have to pay to meet the terms of a contract the better. And so the squeeze began in earnest. Where once you needed two people: one monitoring the system and the other standing by waiting for a computer to ask for a tape to be mounted, now you could ask the person monitoring the system to do that. In fact, I was once asked to design a system so that the monitoring equipment and tape drives could be kept at the contractor’s site, just leaving the computer and main communications gear at the client site. That way many systems could be monitored and attended to by a much smaller crew. Remote communication simply was not fast enough and reliable enough at the time to set up such a system though it is certainly feasible today. The point is that people were becoming redundant.
“Lights out” technology became a buzz-word for a while, especially as the huge old people-dependant machines were phased out. The advantages of having no humans at all in computer rooms were obvious. At the time, people still had to enter the rooms to change tapes, but, otherwise, all monitoring and software support tasks could be done from outside the room. As communications improved, those monitoring and otherwise supporting did not have to be in the same building that the systems were located. They could be anywhere in the country (or the world, as it is today). In fact, I did a lot of remote support of systems from one coast to the other, often from my office at home. I could nurse a sick server in Kamloops, BC, oversee a disk-drive replacement in Halifax, NS, and talk to someone in New York about a software licence, and then “attend” a conference call with my country-wide clients in the morning, all without leaving the house. So, instead of one of me in every city across the country, there was just one living in a remote forest. And all those computers were running smoothly in cool darkened and people-free rooms.
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