A Personal History of Computing - Part 2

At the end of Part 1, we left our Barefoot Boy with Cheek (me – I suspect Max Shulman stole my life for Asa Hearthrug even before I lived it, or having read Barefoot Boy, my subliminal psyche doomed me to live it) in the midst of an awkward puberty, still before the dawning of the computer age...But not a long time before.

Nobody had yet described anything more substantial than Andy Warhol art as “pop culture,” but IBM was – just under our consciousness – already dominating it. the Tornados became the first Brit band to reach number one in the U.S. – bet you thought it was the Beatles – with the instrumental Telstar in 1962. The electronic-sounding record (yes, record, as in vinyl, with grooves) was released not long after the AT&T communication satellite was launched. (Satellites had a “wow” factor back then.) Unbeknownst to me (who was paying attention to such things?) IBM was using Telstar to send information between New York and France. The same year, IBM launched the first airline reservation system, for American Airlines.

Of course, IBM had been producing far more insidious things; they introduced an algebraic computer language called FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation) in 1957, when I was an unsuspecting sixth-grader. Little did I know what a pain in the butt it would be to me more than a decade later.

We children of the Cold War knew about NORAD, of course, and that computers were the basis for the ability to intercept whatever the Soviet Union (before and since, that’s Russia, of course) might throw our way. Oh, in case you haven't heard that acronym latetly, that was the North American Air (not Aerospace) Defense Command (see War Games). IBM made that computer network operational in 1958.

The Mercury sub-orbital space flights (yes, those were a big deal back then, too) were tracked on computers. So yes, computers were in our lives, but they didn’t really reach out and touch us, if you know what I mean. The kind of gee-whiz thing that actually found daily use was IBM’s “Selectric” typewriter. Cool, but most definitely not a computer.

IBM was the real “big blue.” Long before Duke.

Actually, I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota (like Asa) in 1964 when the first “tech stock,” intruded on my consciousness. A local company, Control Data Corporation (CDC) became one of the big go-go stocks of the sixties. It was much discussed around the fraternity. Not that I had any money to do anything about it. Some of the brothers did, of course.

Seymour Cray led a CDC spin-off in the sticks of central Wisconsin into gee whiz territory with stuff like vector and parallel processing, and to accommodate it, we heard about MegaFLOPS (Million Floating Point Operations Per Second).

About then I was off into the service of Uncle Sam, who had a little contretemps going in Southeast Asia. He needed me.