Always Mount A Scratch Monkey

The (probably) true story behind the infamous Field Service meme

Credit: RichVantage via Getty Images

I spent a lot of time in the late 70s and early 80s crammed into small computer rooms. It was an era when computers needed a room of their own, and if you wanted to use one, you needed to be in it as well. I found that invariably, there was also a middle-aged chainsmoking woman in there somewhere with you too, doing data processing.

I don’t know if the job attracted middle-aged chainsmoking women, or if the job slowly morphed non-smoking young women this way over time. Whatever the case though, I endured a lot of secondhand smoke while learning to program. And so did the computer systems.

Here is where my first encounter with computer Field Service happened. One day in high school while I was in the computer room trying to extract Snoopy banner printouts from our PDP-8, a Field Service guy showed up, with a strange device. It was like a mini washing machine, full of some kind of solvent I hope was not too cancer-causing. He proceeded to grab all of our RK05 disk packs, and take the covers off them. One by one, he dropped the raw disk platters into this machine.

And it washed them.

I was amazed. And I still am. I asked about it, and he said that there was a lot of smoke and dust that…