The Early Years

High School

Going waaaay back to high school I can remember trying to make a tic-tac-toe machine out of relays from a junk pinball machine a friend had purchased.  My conclusion: we did not have enough parts. Twice as many relays might have done it.

I include this here only to show that even before computers were common I was a technical person.

College

I transferred to San Jose State College [now SJS University] after completing my lower division work at a community college.  I was drawn by my technical interests to a class another student in the same boarding house was taking.  The class was for the [fictional] TUTAC - Typical ?? Automatic Computer.  SJS had 70mm microfilm teaching material on this machine. I breezed through the first two reels.  I decided to skip a tape or three and selected one that began with a quiz on division.  I carefully studied the possible answers and selected the absolutely worst possible answer.  This led to a quick review of divide that I understood.

SJS had an IBM 1620 computer.  I checked out a book on the 1620 and rapidly learned its instruction set.  At the time I had no knowledge of assembly language.  In fact, I can remember thinking that I had no use for it. I punched one instruction per card and loaded them into memory.  (The 1620 was a decimal digit machine with 12 digit instructions.)

I ended up writing a TUTAC simulator in raw machine code.  Because everything was raw absolute instructions I quickly learned to leave space for patches.  A few months later when I read more about assembly language I moved the simulator into assembly.  Perhaps this learning process was useful.  At least I never had any delusions about what an assembler did.

A Political Problem

My simulator worked past lesson tape 12 where instruction modification was discussed.  (Without index registers TUTAC used instruction modification to access arrays.)  The director of the computer wrote a TUTAC “compiler” that translated each TUTAC instruction into a single 1620 instruction.  But my simulator worked and had to be used when students reached lesson 12.  It must have been a blow to his pride that a student could write more useful code than the computer center director.

My One Computer Class

I finally took a computer class.  After about the third or fourth class meeting I was having trouble keeping from sharp shooting the instructor.  I went to his office and offered to do a project instead of coming to class.  He told me to forget the project but to come for the tests.  That was the easiest “A” I ever got.

During my time at SJS I wrote an interpretive trace for the 1620. It punched one card for every instruction “executed.”  I took the source back to my community college and an interested student changed it from card punch output to line printer output.

After Graduation

I worked briefly for Great Western Chemical in Richmond, CA.  I have no idea if they are still around.  They had two businesses.  Business one: they had a warehouse and trucks and could deliver moderate quantities of many common scientific chemicals.  Business two: they delivered laundry supplies to mostly mom and pop laundries in Sacramento.  I remember the accountant reviewing bills to mail out.  Mostly he discarded bills destined for Standard Oil because they paid invoices shipped with whatever they had ordered.

My job? They wanted a computer operator Einstein who would do filing in his spare time.  And that was not me.  I lasted six weeks.  ‘Twaz just as well.

Department of Water Resources

I read the want ads and saw a notice of a California State civil service exam to be given in Sacramento in a few days.  I phoned and spoke with someone who said he was going to put my name on the list.  When I arrived the test giver did not have my name.  Yet he let me take the test because if I were fibbing my test results would be discarded.

I passed. About a month later I was working for the Department of Water Resources in Sacramento.

A few highlights

I was given an occupational safety report to produce.  I read a sorted deck of cards and filled preprinted boxes with the proper totals.  My program had to punch cards for its printed output.  But the printer was an Electronic Accounting Machine (relay logic) which used two cards to make one 120 column print line.  A more senior programmer said doing so was always a problem.  His mind was focused on the card output.  My mind focused on the print line. I then split the 120 characters into two cards as needed.

The “analyst” in charge of this effort wanted me to use the prior month’s output as input to the next monthly run.  It took a bit of convincing but finally he agreed to add the next month’s data behind the previous data.  As I remember, the key to convincing him was the ease in correcting errors in the original input. (Fix the raw data and run the thing again.)

The Department of Water Resources had a pair of IBM 1620s.  When it was time to upgrade them to a more modern system one consideration was our existing 1620 assembly programs.  DWR was getting a CDC 3300 or 3500 mid range computer system.  CDC offered a 1620 simulator written by some Canadian professor.  But one of our important programs failed to work properly.

I suggested that the program be setup to turn my trace on before the point at which the program seemed to fail and turn it off after the failure.  Running it on a real 1620 produced about 100 punch cards.  The same number of cards were punched running on the simulator.  And <queue fanfare here> printing those cards showed exactly what went wrong.  (The remainder after a divide was incorrect.)  We provided details to the Canadian professor.  He thanked us for the detailed description of the error. In a few days the simulator worked properly.

Actually the most interesting project I was involved with all but died because of the foolish application of one simple rule.  The rule: “We are a COBOL shop.  There will be no assembly language!!!”  As nice as that sounded it ended up killing the project.  Should anybody be interested in the details please write.

In the middle of my time at DWR I received a letter from President Nixon telling me in no uncertain terms that my service was required.  The Army spent a year training me to be a killer. And then got one year of use out of me as a programmer at Fort Huachuca, AZ.

I left Sacramento because my wife wanted us to be close to her family.  I worked briefly for San Jose State and then “transferred” to Control Data Corporation.

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