I attended Data Systems Class "A" School at Mare Island (Vallejo) California, class of December 1983. That's me, second row, second from the left. Petty Officer 3rd Class LaFleur.
Data Systems was the U.S. Navy's computer engineering program for Petty Officers. DS "A" school was 6 months of very intense training on everything a budding computer technician would need to know (and yes, today everyone is called an Engineer, but in the Navy an engineer is the guy who works on the ships propulsion system). Unlike civilian college, there was no history or English to muck up the day, just 8 hours every day learning computer theory. Some of the fun topics included:
- Multi-base number systems, from back before a byte was standarized on 8 bits we had to learn base 2, 7, 8, and 16. Funny story about getting a nieces math question wrong because 4+6 can be 10, 12, 13, or even "A".
- Programming in machine language - and I mean REAL machine as in each system had it's own bit setting system and not of this fancy compiler languages that modern computers use. We did the registry by registry Boolean logic, shifts, counters, jump and indirect jump syntax ... it was pretty amazing to find out that a computer really were incredibly simple as adding two numbers together or copying a number from one location in a register to another. And still is.Years later, the C programming language would seem down right verbose!
- Working through hundreds of pages and pages of schematics comprised AND, OR, NAND, and NOT gates. I can't even begin to describe the mental construct you'd have to build to resolve problems like "if pin 7 on AND gate 219 on figure 128 shorted to ground, the symptom would be ... .
- Timed troubleshooting tests; rushing into the "comtran-10" lab and and having sixty minutes to take voltage readings (pin j102 hot, pin i99 ground. ...) to walk through the prints and figure out what fault had been inserted into the system. I was "an ace" at fixing that trainer ... to bad it only existed in school.
- And on top of the technical training, there was the never ending military BS, crazy hours, endless inspections, keeping you under constant pressure to see if you could handle it. I'd heard that full training (boot camp, Basic Electricity and Electronics, DS "A" school, and DS "C" school) costed nearly a million dollars per recruit and they were going to ensure they got their money worth.
I think we we were the last generation of computer technicians that were given the deep dive into theory. I know later, when PC were popular and line replaceable units the norm, the technicians coming out of school didn't seem to have the same ability to troubleshoot problems that we were expected to. Or maybe that's just me being the old guy bragging about how tuff it was back in the day.
