My first day at West Coast Beauty Supply was a rather quiet Sunday. While San Francisco sees a million people come and go each day to and from work, and while it sees a like number of tourists and visitors on Saturday, Sunday is rather quiet and comparatively empty. So this was a typical Sunday and I had arrived at the main office to learn how to do the backups from Jeff Brown, who was moving to Portland right afterwards.

It was kind of strange being by ourselves, in this three story corner of a converted warehouse. The backups, then and continuing after I had left four years later, was done manually for reliability reasons. Sure you can set up a tape feeder and an automated script to do the backup, but if something goes wrong someone has to be there to fix the problem. Sunday backups are quite important, and most businesses can't take the risk of not having a backup should all that data be destroyed in some unforseen disaster.

Besides the backups, which take about six hours, there was some tuning to be done beforehand. Defragmenting the system disk, purging files, running a couple of special batch jobs. And then mostly it was wait for the backups to run. A good time to go on the Internet or play games or watch television in the big screen on the third floor. I remember one time when some friends and I drove to Reno for the day and I got back late. So I went to work and after a few frantic mishaps I was finally able to finish the backups shortly before 06:00.

During this period I played and finished Doom. There was also this side-view puzzle game. The kind where you're a little secret agent guy and have to jump over obstacles and flip switches, avoiding or shooting the bad guys. Don't remember what it was called, but it was some popular shareware series of games for the PC.

One of the thing that strikes anyone who's visited the San Francisco HQ was the large number of cabling. The IS Department did the cabling themselves, mostly because management is rather frugal with funds. Lots of cable hanging from the ceiling, stapled up there, cable taped to the carpet with masking tape. Not a pretty sight, but it worked. Would have made it hell to trace any cabling problems, although I didn't have any networking knowledge at the time so it wouldn't have been a job given to me.

Another aspect of running a big mainframe system is that the printers are all centralized. We had two high-speed line printers. Capable of printing ASCII text at some 60 lines a second. And it wasn't plain paper it took either, we had to feed it this 11"x14" ribbon paper. You know, the kind that is white on one side and has green and white stripes on the other side. The edges have holes for the mechanism to grab the paper, and it's one big continuous roll, perforated so you can easily separate the pages.

Various batch jobs would run continuously throughout the day, and each one would have some sort of printed output. The printers would make this loud whirring sound as they printed, and the output would go into a basket. Occassionally an Operator would have to take the stack of output and split up the jobs, then sort them into bins where the various users would pick them up. Reminds me of the system that I used when I took a computer class at CSUS. You'd print your job, then go to another building to pick up the printout. See what went wrong then go back to fix any mistakes. Makes you try to make sure to get things right the first time.