My Life With Computers

It was the summer of 1966. Life was good. I was driving a Model A coupe. I had just graduated from high school. I enjoyed playing trombone with the Missoula City Band - a great fun-loving bunch of people. I liked my job. I had a new job title: I was Head Stuffer.

===> A diversion: What is a Head Stuffer?

But summer was coming to an end, and my life was about to take one of its many drastic changes. I was about to head for Bozeman to attend Montana State University.

I had absolutely no idea what I might want to do with the remainder of my life. All I knew was what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to be a doctor. I didn't want to be a lawyer. Or a teacher, accountant, ditch-digger, ... Actually, nothing appealed to me. Electrical Engineering didn't really appeal to me, either, but of all of the things I could think of it seemed the least objectionable. The University of Montana in Missoula didn't teach engineering and Stanford didn't want me (as if I could have afforded to go there if they had accepted me), so it was off to Bozeman for me.

So, I arrived at Bozeman and got settled into the dorm. I took on a job as desk clerk at the dorm to pick up a little spending cash. And got enrolled in the freshman classes for my Electrical Engineering major - most of which had nothing to do with Electrical Engineering. Calculus, Chemistry, that kind of junk. And a 1-credit class orienting us to Electrical Engineering.

The orientation class for that first quarter was an introduction to analog computers. I had heard of computers, of course, but didn't know the first thing about them. So I showed up for the class. The department had two analog computers for us to use. I don't remember much about the things, I never touched one again after that class. I seem to remember that you'd have an equation you'd want to solve, and you'd figure out some circuitry to solve that equation and plug some op-amps in somewhere. Then the silly thing would plot out a graph for you. Borrrring. I sure couldn't see what all the excitement was about computers.

Eventually, spring rolled around. A glorious spring it was. Sunshine most every day, beautiful country around Bozeman. Little did I know that that was the only spring I'd see like that in my 13 years in Bozeman. Most years there'd be a few nice days but mostly rain and snow up through May. Trees would finally bud out in late May or early June. Pitiful.

But life was good. Mostly. There was still all that calculus. Chemistry progressed to organic chemistry. Psychology progressed to Sociology. And after my experiences with analog computers, I dreaded this quarter's orientation class in digital computers.

The school had an IBM 1620 computer buried away in the bowels of Ryan Lab, and our class taught us to program the thing using Fortran II-D. It didn't take me long to find that programming was fun - this was nothing at all like analog computers.

For those of you who might care, the 1620 was a scientific computer introduced by IBM in 1959, the same year it introduced the business-oriented 1401 computer. Unlike today's binary computers, it was a decimal computer.

We'd write our short little assigned programs, and punch them up on cards using a really antique card punch. Then we'd put our deck of cards into our class's card drawer. Twice a day, the operator would run our drawer through the computer, and magically a printout and our deck of cards would show up on the output table. Then we'd look through all the error messages, repunch a few cards, and wait for the next run. Sounds exciting, huh?

Well, I really enjoyed the class - except for the two days during finals week when the computer was broken down with parts strewn all over and I hadn't finished my final project yet. I knew I had found my calling.

So, summer came and it was back to Missoula. I spent the summer delivering mail. As a summer temp, I filled in for all the mailmen going off on vacations, and I think I had every single route at least once. I really learned Missoula like the back of my hand. It was a beautiful summer. I only had to deliver mail in the rain twice. But I lost a couple of weeks work due to a postal strike, and most weeks only got about 30 hours in, and didn't make quite as much money as I had hoped to.

I headed back to Bozeman in the fall, looking forward to the brand spanking new SDS Sigma 7 computer that was being installed during the summer. But they had problems getting it in and up and running, so it was winter quarter before I could take a class in Fortran IV programming. What an improvement over Fortran II-D! And what an improvement over the 1620! I really started getting hooked on computers.

Even with the Sigma 7 computer, I punched my programs up on cards and submitted them, and had to come back later to pick up the outputs. At least we had a bank of nice new card punches, with a lot nicer features than the antique we had used before.

One day during spring quarter, someone told me that there was a teletype terminal hidden away in a back room of Ryan lab and that anyone could go in there and type in and run BASIC programs. I had no idea what kind of computer it was hooked up to, but I went and looked and sure enough, there it was. Interactive computing! I could type in a little program, punch it out on paper tape if I wanted to keep a copy of it, and run it. No waiting for someone to run my cards through or waiting for a printout.

It wasn't until the following fall quarter that I saw the computer this thing was hooked to. It was an HP 2116 minicomputer - one of the first minicomputers. As I recall, it was about 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide, and 3 feet deep (I could be wrong). In addition to the teletype in the other room, it had a little card reader, card punch and printer. It had 8K of memory - core memory, of course, which accounted for much of the size. 8-bit bytes plus a parity bit, so that's 8096 x 9 cores - over 72,000 of them. I was able to open the thing up and look at the arrays of about 72,000 tiny round magnetic cores. Pretty amazing the way they strung those things together, with three or four wires going through each core. No wonder memory was prohibitively expensive back then.

Well, summer rolled around again and I had finished my Sophomore year. I went back for one last summer in Missoula (as it turned out). I wanted my Post Office job back, but the good old U.S. of A. decided that the Post Office had to follow the same rules as other government agencies, which meant hiring on the basis of a Civil Service test. Unfortunately, ten other people - one friend of mine from high school and nine girls - scored ahead of me. My old supervisor wanted me back - I knew all the routes and had experience and all. And he wouldn't hire girls to carry mail bags and deliver mail door-to-door - he'd tried that a few times, and had never had one stick to it more than a week or so. So he hired a couple of them to drive trucks and pick up mail and deliver packages, but my friend Alden was the only summer mail delivery person. So Alden got to put in 50 or 60 hours a week and make all sorts of money while I was left out in the cold.

I took a job with my old employer, the Missoulian. I worked for the advertising department as a copy boy. It wasn't a bad job, I got to run all over town in my Model A picking up and delivering ad copy. But it was minimum wage and again I didn't make nearly as much money as I wanted to. On the other hand, I was working with good people who made the job fun. There's a lot to be said for enjoying your work.

The Missoulian was just in the process of installing a new and much larger press. Completely new technology - most of the old linotypes disappeared along with the old furnace. No more stuffers, either. Most exciting to me was the fact that all the layout was now done with computers. I didn't get to do anything with the computers, but it was interesting watching the ad-men, writers, editors, pressman, and all coming to grips with a new technology.