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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
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2008-05-13Golden Geek: Wandering into Computing
Technorati Tags: orcmid, cybersmith, Golden Geek, early computing, 1950s, Simple Simon, Giant Brains
Although this month is the 50th anniversary of my first line of code, it was not the beginning of my interest. High School MusingsFor a 1950s school student in Washington State, there were no computers around that I knew of. We might have heard about them in some way, but actually seeing one or having much to do with one was another story. In my case, there were no family-member connections with early computing. The only connection I was aware of came in news accounts, library books, and magazine articles. I remember the Univac coverage on television during the 1952 presidential election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the campaign against Adlai Stevenson. I don't remember much of the content and didn't understand anything about "the" Univac, but it stuck in my mind somehow. For context, we had only recently obtained our first family television. There were complex arrangements for network broadcasts to be transmitted to the Pacific Northwest and rebroadcast. Television was not deeply ensnarled in politics yet; we were 8 years away from the first televised presidential debates. There were no satellite links and mobile television units. And of course there were no cable, CNN, blogs, YouTube, or any other of the many ways that now command our attention in the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections. Radio was the dominant broadcast medium and television was just learning how to deal with news and politics, all in glorious black-and-white. Prior to my senior year in high school (1956-1957), I had a student job as a page in the Tacoma Public Library 1952-expanded main library. I was also a member of the Lincoln High School chess club and I did cartoons and a junior chess column for the Washington State Chess Letter. I prepared my columns using mimeograph masters and my manually-operated Smith Corona portable (a premium that I had earned in a paper-route subscription campaign). The drawings were made with a stylus directly on the mimeograph masters. Another feature of that era (and far into the 60s) was carbon paper. White-out had not been invented yet, as I recall, and there were no text editors of course. I and two of my school chums, Ron Lougheed and Jerry Hanson, learned of the Tacoma Chess Club which met on Friday nights in a meeting room of the main library. We would play chess and then, after the library closed, go bowling or to a pool hall downtown. Some nights I missed the last bus and walked the few miles home. It was at the chess club that I met Jerry Cook, a student from the "other" high school, Stadium. (We might have played a tournament against Stadium, I'm not sure.) Jerry was also keen to know more about computers. The library had a book on "Giant Brains" that Jerry was fond of. I didn't dig into it much; it somehow didn't address my curiosity. The big find that Jerry came up with was a copy of the September 1950 issue of Scientific American, with Edmund C. Berkeley's article about Simple Simon, a do-it-yourself project using electro-mechanical relays and a paper-tape feeder. Jerry Cook wanted to see how to build one of these. I confess to having no understanding of what this machine was all about and what its principles were. I did come away with an interest at drawing relay diagrams along with my usual use of ruled paper to play "dots" and draw HO-gauge railroad layouts. Even so, my curiosity about computers was deepened. Collegiate InspirationIn The next inspiring moment came one evening after dinner in the Dabney House lounge at Caltech. Bob Deverill, a career senior until the Institute encouraged him to graduate (with three complete majors, rumor had it) so he could be funded as a graduate student, would often improvise baroque piano in the lounge after dinner. The evening that I remember most is when Deverill was sitting at a table using an odd device with a paper tape through it. Bob was using a manual device to make holes in a paper tape. He said he was writing a computer program, and he showed me the sketch of the program (a flow-chart, as I recall) for computing values of ex. I am not sure why I think of the device as an octal punch, unless it had 6 to 8 keys, one for a setting a punch in each row of the punched tape (with another for punching and advancing the tape to the next frame). It may be because 6-bit codes were written down as pairs of octal digits. However much I am confused about the device, I recall that the tape was for submission to a Datatron 205 computer that was somewhere on the campus (or perhaps at Jet Propulsion Labs). The Invisible Computers at BoeingThat was the totality of my contact with computers until I took an Engineering Aide job at Boeing after dropping out of Caltech after two quarters. I got the job by lucky accident, but that's a separate story. A large part of the engineering aide activity involved making plots on velum paper with a waxy-orange-transfer backing material so the drawing lines would be more opaque and go through an Ozalid copier nicely. We also spent a lot of time with electro-mechanical calculators (Fridens and Monroes) to check computations and convert data to the values used in the plots. You could fall asleep or go into a hypnotic trance waiting for a multiplication to be carried out on one of these devices. I also prepared data using an IBM keypunch, then submitting the data decks for computer processing. I never saw the computer. There were forms that went with the cards, taken by courier to the computer. The form specified the software that processed the data (on an IBM 701 computer) and provided charge-back account information. Results were brought back, in the form of computer print-outs, and put in mail bins that we could pick up the next day. Another aide, Art Van Ausdale, and I were interested in computing and we obtained Dan McCracken's first computer book as a way to study about it. There was a non-credit evening course at the University of Washington that used the book and we registered for it. (Art was also working on a physics major while working, too.) The computer-course instructor was Jackson Granholm (oral history PDF) who spent a lot of time telling jokes. I remember his example of the headlight dimmer switch (when it was on the floor of the driver's side of cars) as a flip-flop (actually, a half-adder). I don't think we returned after that one session. I kept reading the book though. I did pretty well until I got to the chapter that talked about index registers (b-boxes in the terminology of the time). Ted Lomax, the engineer I worked for, was busily learning Fortran from a manual that he had been given. Up to that point, the programs we used had been developed by members of the programming department and all we did was create data and obtain the printed results. Lomax wanted to take advantage of the superior input-output in Fortran on the more-powerful IBM 704 computer to produce results that could be used directly in engineering documents rather than having to be transcribed (and redrawn, where graphs were involved). He saw Fortran as a way to do that and also break the logjam of requiring resources from the programming department. When I left that job before the end of 1958, it was to go where I could be a programmer. I couldn't do it at Boeing without a collegiate degree, a requirement of SPEA, the engineering union at Boeing. My first experience with the computer industry had to do with the Fortran manual. Lomax had a single Fortran primer, but there was a New York City address on the back of it. I wrote to IBM at that address and requested my own Fortran manual. Some time later, I was tracked down at Boeing by one of the IBM Applied Science representatives at Boeing. I was given a manual (although I may have received one in the mail) and asked to please not write to IBM headquarters any more. Someone was upset that I did not know that IBM was not only local but that they had on-site representatives supporting the Boeing account. It apparently reflected badly on the IBM presence in Seattle and at Boeing that I'd written to the company headquarters and the local branch manager took the heat. It never occurred to me that I could look them up in the phone book. After I started college, then moved to Seattle, and from there to New York City, I lost touch with Jerry Cook. He had a traumatic injury as the result of a motor-scooter accident and that changed his life. He did visit my mother from time to time, and we corresponded irregularly until we lost track of each other completely. My main junior- and high-school buddy, Jerry Hanson dropped out of college as quickly as I, and I lost track of him. On a visit to Seattle in 1992, I learned from my mother that he had died. Ron Lougheed became a nuclear chemist and is now retired from Livermore Labs, with a vineyard in Sebastopol, California. We are still in touch. I met Edmund C. Berkeley in the 60s, either at a Share Conference or a Pacific Northwest Computer Conference in Seattle. I met Dan McCracken several years later, around the time of his tenure as ACM President. I read Jack Granholm's articles in Datamation from time to time. One of the IBM Applied Science representatives that I met was Art Speckhard, and I think it was because I was interested in Fortransit, the IBM 650 program that implemented a limited version of Fortran. What I remember was that Speckhard gave me old manuals, probably from his own collection. It was interesting to learn, later, that he had founded a company in California. Art Van Ausdale graduated from college and was on a project at Boeing to build their own computer for special design work (I think) when we ran into each other in the mid or late 60s. Sometime after Donald Knuth became a graduate student at Caltech, he asked me if I remembered Bob Deverill. I did, but I don't recall what led Knuth to ask me. I don't want to talk about how far we walked through snow to get to school or any of those other silly things. I do want to give a sense of how differently-connected the world was in 1958 compared to 2008. The revolution in air travel brought about by jet aircraft and many supporting innovations was just getting started. Neither I nor any member of my family had ever flown in an airplane and that was not unusual. My first trip to Caltech was by train to Glendale and after that I went to and from Pasadena by Greyhound bus. The Interstate Highway Project was just getting started. None of us had been outside of the United States, although my father was in the Merchant Marine in the Pacific during World War II. The passenger rail system was different than now, although the trains are not that much different, except for the WiFi and on-board movies. Electronic communication was just starting out. Radios and television sets had tubes in them and the transistor was just becoming recognized as a game-changing innovation. Long distance calling was expensive and avoided; there were still party lines in households. Telephones had mechanical dials and telephone exchanges were populated by exotic mechanical devices and relays. People communicated by correspondence and the U.S. mails. The separate U.S. Postal Service had not been created yet. Newspapers, magazines, and books were primary sources of information and subscriptions for all of those were common. Sputnik happened in October, 1957, while I was an entering freshman at Caltech. In 1958 the US was struggling to demonstrate the ability to launch anything at all into near-Earth orbit. All of these features of life at the time, as well as the concern about nuclear weapons and the cold war, were the context from which computing was to emerge as the ubiquitous and often invisible feature of modern life that it is today. [update 2008-05-14T00:22Z I had to mention the Interstate Highway Project as another data point. I am sure there are others.] Comments: Dennis, I hadn't realized that we shared this: dropping out of college after two years to go work for Boeing as an engineering aide. And in 1978, when I made that move, it was OK for an aide to write programs. In fact, that's how and why I learned Fortran very quickly: none of the engineers in my group were proficient with Fortran, we had lots of numbers to crunch (7/7/7 noise staff, acoustic data from flight tests mostly), and by learning to program I could stop doing other more tedious types of work. I started out punching cards that were submitted to an IBM 360 located in Wichita, and then in 1980 we got a PDP 11/70 minimcomputer and you could sit at a terminal and type the programs right into the computer! Thanks for writing this up. We've come a long way, baby. - Doug
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14 May, 2008 15:55
Regarding Collegiate Inspiration. The input to the Datatron 205 was six-channel Flexowriter paper tape. Four channels were used to represent 1-2-4-8 yielding a single binary coded decimal digit. The other two channels supplied a "clock" and "finish" indicator. The Datatron at JPL was serial number one of Electrodata Corporation's machine that would later become the Burroughs 205. |
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