My Life With Computers

My senior year, I was unable to take a single computer class. I pretty much took all that the fledgling Computer Science department had to offer in my junior year, and this year I had to make up all the Electrical Engineering classes that I hadn't taken in order to make room for them.

Electrical engineering and I weren't seeing eye to eye. I could pretty much handle the math - and that's what the classes were, basically. But I never could get any feel for what the math was telling me. I couldn't relate any of what I was learning to real world phenomena. Other students who had worked with ham radio were thrilled to be learning just exactly what the Q of a circuit was and they understood it - I certainly never gained any understanding of that, it was just an equation. If the university had offered a degree in Computer Science, I would have switched in the blink of an eye. But my only real choices were electrical engineering or math, and the one junior-level math class I got into made me realize that I had gone just as far as I wanted to in that subject.

Fall and winter quarter I had to take electromagnetic wave theory. The prof for this class was John Hanton, who I feel was easily the best prof I ever had for any course I ever took. He made the material come to life. He made it interesting and understandable, no mean feat when you're teaching electromagnetic wave theory. I actually felt like I understood some electrical engineering for the first time.

In fact, I decided to build on this and signed up for microwave theory for my spring quarter option. The prof for this class had worked for Bell Labs, and expected everyone to be a genius. The first couple of weeks I understood things really well. The third week I easily grasped the photoelectric effect. But the fourth week I began to get a bit overwhelmed. I tried, I really tried. I read the book, I attempted the exercises, I tried to grasp the labs, but as the weeks went by all I got was lost. I'd go consult with the prof, but he couldn't bring himself down to my level and I never understood a thing he told me.

Finals week rolled around and I was completely underwater when it came to microwaves. I didn't bother to go take the final because I knew there was no point in it. But this prof was also my advisor. He sought me out in my office in Ryan Lab, and gave me the test there and then. I put my name at the top. I read through the four questions. I thought about it a bit. Then I gave him the test back without having written a thing on it except my name.

There were only four students in that class. He gave one A, one B, one C and one D. Thank god there wasn't a fifth student in the class - I wouldn't have graduated.

One day in November during my senior year, I got a message from one of the secretaries in the electrical engineering dept that Dr. Martin wanted to see me. "Who?", said I. "He's the head of Civil Engineering," she replied.

Now, I had a talent for getting in trouble now and then and had had a couple of unpleasant run-ins with the head of Electrical Engineering. So I said to myself, "self," I said, "what in the hell have you done to get the notice of someone in Civil Engineering?" So, mystified, I went to see him.

Well, remember that class in algorithms from last spring? Dr. Martin had heard via the grapevine that I had a talent for programming, and he needed a programmer. The State Highway Department had a couple of old systems they were using that they wanted to update. The programmers on their computer staff just couldn't seem to grasp the fact that an IBM 360 computer was capable of a little more than was the old IBM 1401 that they used to have.

If you have some idea of how Microsoft and Unix users view themselves and each other, you might have some feel for how IBMers and non-IBMers felt about each other back in 1969. You were either pro-IBM or anti-IBM, and there was no middle ground. We had a Sigma 7 computer on campus, and all the profs in the Computer Science department were anti-IBM. I don't recall any of them ever saying one good thing about IBM or its equipment. In fact, all you had to do to get a laugh out of the students was just recite those three letters. I really didn't know a thing about IBM computers except that they were worthless piles of junk that I didn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole. But a $250/month tax-free research assistantship sounded pretty damn good.

Dr. Martin would have prefered to hire civil engineering students, of course, and he did hire a couple of them along with me. But civil engineering was even further behind than electrical engineering at teaching any computer knowledge and the civil engineering students had a harder time of learning PL/I and DOS JCL than I did. I blissfully dove in, struggling at first but picking things up pretty well. It didn't take me long to realize that IBM's reputation on campus was a bit wrong. Their orientation was different. The Sigma 7 was much more suited to a university environment than an IBM 360 would have been - it was designed for online access, and computer terminals were sprouting up all over campus. The 360 was strictly batch-oriented, and required a lot more knowledge to use. But when it came to reliability and just general quality, the IBM had it all over the Sigma 7. And PL/I - which was designed specifically for the 360 computer's design - was the ideal language to use.

Our first contract was basically a demonstration of feasibility. The highway department had a number of printed books that had to be prepared each year, and we would develop a database system from which a couple of these books could be generated. One was the "roadlog" report - essentially an inventory of all of the highways in the state with information such as year built, type of material, thickness of surface material, shoulder width, etc. The other was a "traffic" report that showed the traffic volumes on the highways.

At that time, the highway department had their own computer, an IBM 360 model 40. Like I said, it was strictly batch and we had to go to their computer center with our boxes of punched cards, run them through, wait for the listing, make our changes and get another turnaround. The problem: the computer was in Helena, 100 miles away. So we'd spend the week carefully working up our programs and punching them up, and reading through them trying to catch mistakes ahead of time so as not to waste precious turnarounds on dumb typos. About once a week, we'd get a car from the motor pool and make the trek to Helena. And of course, that was also our opportunity to meet with the people there to figure out just what they wanted, show them what we had so far, and get told that that just wasn't right at all, it had to be THIS way.

Security at the computer center was extremely tight. We'd show up at their quitting time and they'd all leave, telling us to shut the computer down when we were done. They taught us how to do that, and how to restart the computer if it happened to crash while we were using it (which only happened very rarely). We weren't given much other instructions on operating the thing.

One night, I had just run the cards for one of my larger programs through the card reader and set the deck of 300 cards or so on the lid of the line printer. We had never had the printer run out of paper before - how was I supposed to know that the lid raised itself automatically when the paper ran out? It took us a good hour to figure out how to put in a new box of paper, and it took me a good deal longer than that to get all those cards back in order. And to repunch the ones that I was unable to get out from under the printer.

This went on for about a year. Then one night, Frank was there by himself and one of the hydraulic lines to a disk drive came loose and started spraying hydraulic fluid everywhere. No one had ever bothered telling us who to call in case of something like this, and there was quite a mess by the time he finally got someone. After that, they assigned us an operator for the night. Usually, the operator would just do his own thing and leave us to actually run the computer, but it was sure nice having one around to take care of the little chores like changing printer paper.

To be continued...