Anecdotes, easy to digest, etc.
Related from ICRA and its people
… Everywhere on this website you see the abbreviation and the long text of ICRA. Only a short time after the setup of ICRA my colleagues had found a different meaning for ICRA: “I can't reach Arthur”. A strategy which found my immediate denial. At the time, this was easy to postulate: there was no Internet, no mobile phone and we had always worked on an international level between the US and Switzerland. 6 hours time difference at best and me running around on trips to meet with clients, easily can lead to such conclusions. From 1983 onward I had one of the early mobile (quasi …) phones in my car which worked only in Holland and Germany; crossing the border to Switzerland, it had to secured for non-use (the frequencies were different anyway so that one could not use it). But the saying kept on …
... (1998) when delivering software to an important client they had planned 2 days for getting the system to be installed and working. Mike asked me if we had not understood them well enough when designing the software. He claimed he would be done with everything in 20 minutes and why did they allocate 2 people for two days? We had everything installed in 20 minutes and they were totally astounded and asked if we could put in certain features in a next release they had not thought of at the time of the contract. Mike asked them about these features and while talking to them he hammered the C++ code into the development machine. After one hour, all the features were working and active. Absolutely astounded faces. We then were invited to celebrate a colleague’s “Methusalem” birthday. The answer to my question as to the age of this colleague was “really old, he turned 34”. This caused me, at the time 53, to consider my withdrawal from active business in this sector…
.... (1989) the first bearing ball test machine had completed its acceptance jobs at the customer. The owner of the company, Mr. Ennen, came with a small suede black bag and wanted to do his own testing. He poured the content of the bag (bearing balls) into the hopper, all bearing balls run at 8 balls per second through the machine. All pass, except one, it is blown out of the machine into the fault bin. Mr. Ennen takes that ball, puts it under a microscope and puts all balls back into the hopper. This went on for 10 minutes, every time all balls pass except one, Mr. Ennen inspects it and pours the content back in. “It is alright, it is always the same ball”. Mike showed real signs of relief …
.... (1992) a world novelty is to take place at Deutsche Telekom in Munich: two terminals are placed 2 m apart, between them a satellite link to the DFS satellite with a 2 MBit transponder, or 72’000 km into space. We are to show full text retrieval with image transfer from a database. The guests from important German industries are invited at 11:00 a.m. for the presentation. The head of ICRA had disappeared by 9:00 a.m. Thomas Hentrich from Deutsche Telekom asks the colleagues where Arthur Sutsch has gone to. The ICRA colleagues tell him in a calm voice, he went downtown to buy a computer as one of the terminals was not working properly anymore. Around 10:00 a.m. Arthur Sutsch was back, we switched PC cards, hard disks, etc. 15 minutes later everything worked again. The presentation was a sounding success. Thomas Hentrich still mentions these moments today and how he had a squeezy feeling in his stomach …
.... (1976) the mount of the large RC 800 Telescope is discussed with the shop owner, Mr. Baumgartner. A. Sutsch has selected a three-leg support for the alpha axis inclined here at 46°. A three legged design cannot wobble. A large pressure south bearing takes up the downward load. Two freely moving rollers of 91 mm high each and at 60° apart hold the 8.4 tonnes of the revolving parts (telescope, alpha axis, counter weight) on a ring 910 mm in diameter and 110 mm wide. Mr. Baumgartner is shaking his head: when the alpha motor starts running, the alpha axis will shift. I answer “no, there has to be a force stronger than the 8.4 to so that the telescope can make a sideways movement; the 500 W DC motor does not provide the momentum even with its geartrain”. Mr. Baumgartner, an experienced precision mechanic, shakes his head and maintains it is my telescope, I should know what happens. At the first test run, there are several measuring devices attached with a precision of 1/1000 mm. The alpha axis starts to move. No movement is indicated in the gauges. Mr. Baumgartner shakes his head and A. Sutsch consoles him „I am only a physicist but I know how to calculate forces”…
... (1999) the head of a large south-German automobile company explains why he wants to have a computer that tells him what has to be developed anew and which parts can remain the same as in the previous model. According to him, the automobile is invented from scratch by his developers when designing a new model – and this costs a fortune. He uses as an example the boot door of the station wagon model that cost DM 2 million to quit squeaking. A. Sutsch drove such a car and explained to him that he asked his wife to drive while he was using a stethoscope and crawled into the boot in order to locate the noise. A piece of soft rubber for Fr. 3.00 solved the problem ….
