The trials, tribulations, and thrills of setting up and operating a one-person computer job shop for calculating magnetics fields and other sundry things

A brief history of job shops since the caveman era is surveyed, and the essential elements of a job shop are found to be: to earn your living performing a useful service, or creating a useful object, for your contemporaries. The complexities of setting up a computer job shop are described. Inspection of a symbolic floor plan of the shop shows a Program Development, Installation, and Repair Lab that operates with the well-known pitfalls and traps that occur when a real live person interacts with a large, stupid computer. The Output Assembly and Analysis Lab is the holding area where up to N projects are worked on simultaneously. On the main floor of the shop resides the program load modules, some of which are described in detail. Separate from the main shop area is the Remote Job Entry Lab, affectionately called the Physics Group Zoo. The creatures that dwell there are also described to illustrate the difficulty in data preparation and job submission. In spite of all these adversities, the thrill of solving complex problems makes it all worthwhile.