What is an American car?
This video takes you through the build process of the BMW Z4 sports convertible.
The reason I moved to Lansing Michigan in 1983 was to replace Oldsmobile’s IBM computer software with software that ran on Tandem. Telling several thousand union workers to go home for the day because the IBM crashed again – and totally screwing up your “just in time” supply chain gets very expensive very fast. My main contribution was writing the programs that printed the pieces of paper that travel with the cars and subassemblies telling people on the line what to do as each car goes past. Robotic assembly was still a couple years away.
A few metrics to notice – this plant produces about 500 other cars and 100 of these sports cars a day – employing around 4,400 workers. That means around 8 hours of labor per car to assemble the car – not including the labor in Munich to build the engine, the labor at Lear to make the seats, etc. Low non-union labor costs in South Carolina is why they built this plant – as the video points out, many of the cars built in South Carolina are exported back to Europe.
Compare and contrast with this almost identical video of the factory in Brampton Ontario, where the Dodge Challenger is built
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiVMvV_d1eY
This factory was built in the 1980s by American Motors. My friend from Chicago worked at this plant putting in Tandem software with very sophisticated robotic assembly operations. At the time, I was doing consulting work just as Chrysler “took over” AMC. They were stunned – that little company that built the Javelin , Gremlim, Pacer and Hornet (and their joint venture with Renault) had a brand new assembly plant that was a decade ahead of the best plant Chrysler had. Chrysler felt they needed to have a consistent assembly plant operation – they could either upgrade the old Chrysler plants to bring them up to AMC’s technology or they could rip out the robots and turn their brand new assembly plant into a 1950 era assembly plant. Care to guess what they decided?
I could go on and on about all the nuances of the technology and the people in these two videos. Both the Olds plant in Lansing and Buick City in Flint are now just holes in the ground. (a brand new much smaller plant was built in Lansing, the one in Flint is an empty lot)
Not that it matters to anyone but me, but I misstated something. I went to Oldsmobile to write IBM mainframe software (COBOL IMS DB/DC). While doing that, I put the bug in oldsmobile’s ear to consider Tandem – Computerworld had a series of very detailed articles describing the technology. I suggested if they did go with Tandem, I would really like to be involved. They did, I was, and having experience in both was very helpful and set the direction for my “career”
Work with Harold Brown or had he retired by then?
Name doesn’t sound familiar, but it was a long time ago. At the time, GM was in a turf battle. The “GM Tech Center” in Warren was empire building, creating more and more staff creating more and more process and procedures and was incapable of delivering systems in less than 5 years. GM didn’t have 5 years to waste.
Somehow, Oldsmobile got money as part of rebuilding its assembly plants to fund computer systems unconstrained by the Tech Center rules. The plant went live on time and everything worked. While we were there was when GM bought EDS and H Ross Perot cleaned house and a large part of the GM programming types took the 1 month per year of service and got the hell out.
It was kind of shocking to me how little fallout there was. Model Year changeover came and went with very few problems.
I used to be a mainframe cobol programmer (learned it while using card punch and on a time-share computer). Also during that time (91) I had to dabble in IMS DB/DC. I so much like relational DBs much better.
Tandem Non-Stop. Brilliant in its day. I learned Fortran IV, ALGOL, COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) on teletype terminals connected to IBM Mainframes and mid-range machines. IBM IMS was essentially a btree file system. It was fast. Move to MVS and install DB2 and you got relational and slower by far. Nowadays, DB2 screams, but nobody cares. 88 anyone?
okay, I’ll take the bait into computer talk 🙂
I like doing things that people say are impossible or just would think are crazy. While working at NCNB, we had great simple report generator called Easytrieve (later renamed Pro/Grammer) [Eventually bought by Computer Associates, and probably still could get a job doing it :))
It had the provision for reading in record definitions for your wonderful flat files
field1 1 5 A
field2 6 4 N
….
That’s roughly from memory – it was the starting position in the record followed by the length and the type (number, Comp-3, Integer). It had no provision to read in a COBOL record definition and figure that out.
So I decided one evening to write a COBOL record layout parser -in Easytrieve-, which had nothing remotely built into the language to support anything beyond being able to pull out a character from the middle of a string, and very limited local storage. So I successfully wrote this tool (invoked with a TSO CLIST) that would grab the COBOL record definition from the library, generate an Easytrieve record layout and store that into the Easytrieve record definition PDS. It eventually was distributed to the Easytrieve Users Group. It wasn’t perfect – I’m not a computer science student (I was an accounting major), and couldn’t have told you what BNF was or how to write a real parser. I like brute force 🙂
As part of doing that, I learned things about COBOL that I had no idea you could do – because for my utility to work, they had to handle it. One was 66 levels…….
66 ART-STONE RENAMES BILLING123 THRU END-OF-RECORD.
or putting usage on group items
05 GROUP123 USAGE COMP.
10 INT1 PIC S9(4).
10 INT2 PIC S9(4).
US Foods is 99% written in COBOL which is also part of why it’s a bit hard to find people. I’m mostly a TAL programmer, but have no problem with using COBOL. I’m not a religious person.
The first job someone paid me money to do was a shop that used PL/1 – IBM’s answer to create a unified programming language that could be used for anything anywhere.
It died a pretty fast death as IBM dominated the language and I think competitors expected that at some point IBM would take some legal action or otherwise try to make it proprietary or impossible to maintain – and lock out their competitors.
The DoD then tried to create Ada as the programming language to end all programming languages – so you could use the same language to print payroll checks and do navigation of ICBMs.
In the end C seems to have won, despite being a highly parochial AT&T language designed by two guys in a corner with too much time on their hands.
another cracker
http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2014/02/14/knock-that-white-boy-out-arrests-made-after-mob-of-teens-attack-disabled-vet/