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I really got involved in computers
when we first commissioned the U.S.S. Chief
down here and that's when they said all this
old, ancient material that they had back in
the '70s was going out and being replaced by
all these computer systems. And I had no idea,
no background knowledge of computers beside
what we learned in A School, which was the basics,
and when I got to my first ship, that's when
they brought onboard the - back then we had
IBM 486 computer, and each command-- I mean,
each office code inside that ship received a
computer and they say we had to take all-- take
all the message traffic from computers. Well,
we call in, do a download or gate-- a phone
download with their COM center, process everything
on the computer, take that information off the
computer, download it to diskettes, and then
we had to teach everyone in our command on how
they use the computers or read their message
traffic. And computers played a big part in
it because they incorporated all the patch panels
that-- removed all the patch panels and made
that computerized and everything. It was electronics
patch panels now. We had to sit down at a computer,
figure out, okay, what's a DTE? What's a DTC?
At a terminal. . .Data Communication set and
data terminal set and so. I mean, it was . .
. a big change process going on there and then
trying to find a lot of schools to go to help
me understand all the stuff they was incorporating.
And without the school that the Navy had at
the time and stuff, I would have been lost.
It was manual patch panels.
You just plug in material-- I mean, patches
to hook up one signal to another signal-- a
signal to your equipment. Now that they did
away with all of that, we went from computers
where we had to electronically do everything.
So it was an interesting transformation there.
I learned that in our-- they
call it Information System Technician School
right now, but it was basically Radiomen C7
School where we learned-- start learning most
of the information. And
a lot of it I did on-the-job training by watching
other people, which paid big dividends later
on because I used to have this one Chief here
go around start setting up circuits on a computer
and I was curious about it. I asked him, you
know, could you show me what you're doing and
stuff so I can learn it as well? And he was
more than helpful. He sat down there, explained
it to me how things work on a computer, what
to look for if you start running into problems
and everything, computer gives you certain error
codes where you had to go look up in the book
and find out what those error codes were so
you can go back in there and troubleshoot.
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