My Life With Computers

Summer 1969 was a good one.

About halfway through spring quarter, Collins Radio came to campus interviewing for juniors in electrical engineering for their summer employment program. They didn't interview us individually, they just had a group meeting for about 50 of us and had us fill out applications. Lo and behold I was one of three students chosen from MSU for the 100-student program. I was one of the first chosen out of the 100. My boss had a project that needed a programmer, and I had more computer experience than the average electrical engineering student at the time. So it was off to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I didn't own a car, but the other two that were going from MSU did. My folks drove me to Billings where I met them for the trip out. Once we got there, we took an apartment together.

My group's project was a test station for airplane equipment for one of the airlines. When a plane would land, all Collins gear could be quickly removed (it was all plug-in modules) and mounted on the test station. The computerized station would perform a series of tests on the gear to make sure it was all up to snuff. My project: write software and design hardware to allow the test station to test itself. The hardware was an interface unit that would plug in where radio and other equipment would otherwise plug in for testing, and that basically fed the components back to each other - power supplies back to voltmeters with appropriate resistance, that kind of thing. The software was written in a language called ATLAS. The logic was something like:

Connect #1 DC power supply to #1 DC voltmeter.
Apply 30 volts.
Does voltmeter read 30 volts plus or minus 5%?
If no, try with #2 DC power supply to decide if power supply is bad.
If still no, try with #2 DC voltmeter to decide if voltmeter is bad.
etc.

There were quite a few components to check out and all had to be tested at various power levels, so it was fairly complicated. The most difficult problem to overcome was trying to verify that an ammeter would read 30 amps when fed 30 volts - requiring a 1-ohm resistor. And the test had to be within 5%, so the resistor needed to be have 5% accuracy at a very minimum. 30 amps is quite a bit to feed through a 1-ohm resistor, and I only found one company that had such a thing. It was a wire-wrapped thing about eight inches long and two inches in diameter, and only had an accuracy of 10%. I had to sell my boss on the idea that that was the best we could do. It was only rated for around 5 amps, but the specs said that it could carry 30 amps for about two seconds. So I had to make sure to get measurement quickly and get the power killed.

I never got the chance to actually run my program, although my hardware box showed up before I left. The computer for our test system - the latest and greatest Collins C System - was late arriving, and the ATLAS compiler was even later - it didn't arrive until after the summer was over.

The Collins summer program was a lot of fun. Every Wednesday we'd attend an orientation session that taught us about some aspect of Collins Radio. Among other things, Collins did a lot of communications work for the government. The session I remember most was one where we were shown the hot phones. There was one that would ring a phone that always had to be near President Nixon - he was never to be out of touch from that. We didn't get a demonstration of that, but they did contact several high-ranking generals just to demonstrate how they always had to be available.

The building across the street from where I worked had a huge antenna in front of it. I learned that this was the largest and most powerful antenna in the country - possibly in the world. It was the one used for communications with astronauts. This was the summer of the first moon landing and some of the radio equipment in use in the capsule and lunar lander was Collins gear. The day before the big event, I wandered back to the area where the engineers responsible for that equipment worked. The best TV they had managed to scrounge to watch the event was an old black-and-white set, circa 1950.

I wasn't in town to watch the landing on TV. My roommates decided to take a trip to Chicago instead.

===> A short diversion: A trip to Chicago.

Summer came to an end. I splurged $295 of my hard-earned money on a 1962 Mercury and headed for home. I had time for a week-long vacation at the Collins ranch in Oregon, then it was back to Bozeman.