A Personal History of Computing - Part 3

(This was written on Wednesday, November 28. I thought it was now time to get on with the story.)

I was headed off to the United States Army when we left Part 2. The army of the sixties and early seventies wasn’t much into computing power. Of course there wasn’t much computing power any place else, either. Perspective? We went to the moon with less data processing and storage than a cell phone. Heck, the space shuttle’s computers – all together – don’t have the power to run a good photo processing application.

The sixties were a different era in every way, including computing. I don’t know what NORAD was doing inside Cheyenne mountain, but the Army was using plotting boards to compute the trajectory of an artillery shell over its twenty clicks of distance. They (and I) were pretty good at it, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself – that artillery phase was a few years later, in the Guard. In the sixties, in Vietnam, the Army was into communications. Not cell phones, but secure radio with scrambling devices set every day with a different code key via a plunger of seventy-two different length rods. The Air Force in Vietnam dropped small listening devices, into the jungles of the Ho Chi Minh trail. In the 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, from OP Phantom in I Corps we listened, then called those artillery rounds, the ones plotted on a table, computed on a purpose-built slide rule. Then we listened to the result. Entertaining stuff.

After those GI days, the United States paid for more college, and as much as I loved history, I had bigger aspirations than teaching. (Not sure how I could have been that stupid. That’s exactly what I should have done. Taught history.) I returned to the University of Minnesota, to the school of business. That’s where I ran into the FORTRAN thing I mentioned.

There was a super-computer at Lauderdale, a postage-stamp inner-ring suburb between the two U campuses. Control Data? Not sure. It was a Sperry Univac in Blegen Hall, (also known as “Classroom Building”) between the Business Tower and the Social Science Tower that I was concerned with. That computer was downstairs behind a glass wall next to a lunch room filled with studying business and social science (yes, including history) majors drinking coffee and studying, talking, eating. I was sometimes waiting for a computer program to run. In FORTRAN.

It wasn’t that simple, and it sure wasn’t foolproof. After you decided what you wanted to do, say a linear regression analysis of something or other, you had to flow chart the logic of it. If A ---> then B -----> Is B > C? Yes ----> then....well, you get the idea.

After the flow chart confirmed (or seemed to confirm) that logic, punch card the statements. Punch cards. Sometimes called IBM cards. I can still hear, feel the clunk of those heavy metal machines making chads. long before that word entered our cultural lexicon. Logic (program) cards, and data cards, all checked and rechecked and arranged just right, then put into cubby holes, where the computer operator could grab then from the other side and “run” the program

Then off to drink coffee, and wait for the result to come back. One hour, two. There it is – in a cubby hole – and immediately I can see it’s trouble. The card pack, and one thin sheet of greenbar paper just enough to ID a dreaded error, card punch, logic...something. More than once the beginning of a long night, running the damn thing until it worked. Back to the coffee, pencil, flow chart, cards. Find the error, re-punch the cards that (I thought) were wrong. Run it again – and again – until that thick bundle of green bar came back with results, pages of data, and a crude graph.

Such was computing in the early seventies. In 1973 I was on my way to work for a big corporation, a first home, and a baby. In Bettendorf, Iowa.