Phillip - Texas (3/26/2010)
What did people do back in the day? (how ever long ago that is for you.) Where did you get your information from, technical manuals and trial and error? I'm talking like back in the days of punch cards and computers only universities and governments could own. You couldn't just go ask someone because no one would know what the heck a dip switch was.Point: It's paradoxical, how can you determine if a piece of information is correct if you are the one searching for the correct answer?
Point: I think, ultimately, it shakes out those types of people who are prone to tinker with technology. Let me try it then log my results, learn, evaluate, then make a slight change and try it again, then document, then share what I learned.
Anecdote: When I first learned from the Internet about low level formatting of hard disks I promptly ruined my 10GB IDE drive. (although it did work the first couple of times.)
Can someone offer up a story from more than 15 years ago?
Manuals mostly; failing that - just keep testing/tinkering until you find the solution. I don't go back so far as the punch card era, but even in the late 80's and early 90's, you didn't have centralized places to find such info.
I do find that my older books were substantially better with complete detail than the newer stuff (where you're lcky to get any schematic, let alone a functional schematic you could use for repairs).
I remember having to resodder a motherboard backplane for some critical server based on scavenging parts from another machine and relying on a black and white "picture" of the motherboard layout.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?