Customer Setup of the NCR PC-8. - THE CORE MEMORY

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONThe results reported here are based upon the videotapes. Readers interested indetails beyond those reported here should view the two previously mentioned videotapes.- First Videotape - Hardware Unpacking and InstallationOveraI1, setup of the PC-8 was a very time-consuming and unpleasant experience.The knowledgeable participants in this experiment were unable to complete it and had tocall in NCR field engineers for assistance. In fact, even the NCR engineers had troubleand had to call for help.As was noted earlier, the first session included all of the tasks associated withsetting up a complete system, up to installing a 360K floppy drive. A summary of thesession is shown in Table 1. Almost 113 of the time (29 minutes) was spent attempting toinstall a floppy drive, a task which was never completed, and another 18 minutes wasspent installing the graphics card. Even installing the co-processor, just one chip, tookeight minutes. Much of the hour-and-a-half was spent trying to figure out (unsuccessfully)what to do.Problems were encountered in virtually every task, as described in the section thatfollows. For each taslr, a listing of the activities is provided along with a commentary.The initial step in setting up the PC-8 was to unpack it. (See Table 2 for the timedata.:) The first problem faced was deciding which box to unpack. There was no "open mefirst" label, and for several of the boxes, no labels identifying their contents. The smallestbox .was opened first because it looked like it might contain manuals and setupinstructions. After opening it, removing the manuals, and finding out what they were, themanuals were put back in the box, because they were the wrong ones. About 2-112minutes were wasted doing this.Since the general assembly instructions couldn't be found, setup proceeded withoutthem. The participants guessed the system unit should be assembled first. Consequently,the heaviest box was opened next, since the system units are usually quite heavy. In fact,the box was so heavy it was best handled by two people, but there were no instructionssuggesting that two people should be considered.At that point there was a delay of 1 minute and 16 seconds in which theparticipants identified themselves on the tape, something obviously not required during thenormal setup procedure, but required for the videotape.