C is for Computers

I made my living working with computers for 45 years. I joined RCA in Palm Beach Gardens in 1965 and worked on the bring-up floor for their Model 301 computer. As a technician, I tested them and fixed them when they emerged from manufacturing. Memory was 4K of magnetic core donuts. It had no arithmetic capability in hardware; it used table lookup -- if you wanted it to add 2 and 3, it went to location 23 in memory and pulled up a 5. Primitive, indeed.

A year later on June 6, 1966 (i.e., 6/6/66), I joined Control Data in Minneapolis as a hardware Customer Engineer. They offered me $550/month. I was hired to go to a site on Kodiak, Alaska to babysit a small system. They had a change in requirements and I had done well in training, so they offered me to stay in Minneapolis and train on their supercomputer, the CDC 6600. (Pictured above). After training, I went to a site in Albuquerque and a mere four months later I received a phone call, "How would you like to go to France for a year?" After a flight to Minneapolis for a physical, a stop in Chicago for a passport, return to Albuquerque, a drive to Tampa (where I traded my Chevy for a VW Fastback for delivery in Paris) and a flight to Paris, I arrived in my dress western suit, cowboy hat, boots and a bullwhip in one of my two suitcases for work in France. I was assigned to Sud Aviation in Toulouse, which is 400 miles south of Paris. It was a very educational experience.

When I returned to the states, I worked as a Diagnostic Programmer designing and programming the diagnostics for a black box that allowed two of the supercomputers to talk to each other. It was a super computer in its day. Of course, your cell phone today has many times the capability of that big machine pictured above.

Digital Equipment made me an offer I couldn't refuse to go back into hardware as a Regional Customer Engineer. I found I didn't like being back in hardware, so I jumped ship after only nine months and became a software instructor for Univac in the Washington, DC area.

I had an opportunity to return to Florida and worked for GE's nuclear plant in Largo, then at Kennedy Space Center in the Shuttle Firing Rooms. I then spent 15 years with Harris Corp. in Melbourne, Florida and worked on several interesting projects including a nuke blast detector system at Patrick AFB, working on programming spy satellites to put "sunglasses" on them so Russian lasers wouldn't harm them and various bar code systems for manufacturing.

I joined Raytheon in 1995 in St Petersburg, Florida and worked on various manufacturing software systems. THe last ten years at Raytheon, I designed and programmed web applications using Perl for their intranet. I retired in 2010 and many of those web apps are still running!

So... I have seen it all. Magnetic core, paper tape, teletypes, time share systems, monster supercomputers, PCs, the web.