Can you believe it? I’ve been “retired” for two and one-half months now; how time flies when you’re having fun?!
For 13 years I spent at least part of each day in front of a computer. For the past two and a half months I’ve spent at least part of each day in front of a computer. Is there something wrong here?
Wait - there’s more!
Did my “love affair” with computers begin a mere 13 years ago? ‘Fraid not. When I was u the Navy lo these many years ago, my last duty assignment was to Joint Numerical Weather Prediction (JNWP) in Washington, DC. That was in 1955 and JNWP was a joint effort of the Navy, Air Force and the Federal Weather Bureau; we were taking the first faltering steps in the digital and long-term prediction of weather. Of course, starting from scratch, we didn’t have much to work with. Not much, that is except a young mathematical genius, “Dr. Ted,” who was the heart and soul of the operation. I don’t know how old Dr. Ted was but he couldn’t have been more than 30 and was so baby faced he sported a huge walrus mustache so people would take him seriously.
We occupied the entire third floor of one wing of the Census Bureau in Suitland, Md. It wasn’t that we had such a large staff; actually, there were only a handful of us compared to the Fleet Weather Central on the floor below. However, computers of that day bear little resemblance to those you have in your home or office today.
The processing units, today’s tower, were the size of refrigerators and looked a lot like them; there were six of them. Input was accomplished at a station that in size and shape could have passed for an upright piano. The similarity stopped there. This behemoth had a keyboard, not like a piano but somewhat similar to a modern computer keyboard; there also was a large panel of miniature lights on the upright part; they all meant something to the operator but were a complete mystery to anyone else. And finally, there was a printer of the size and shape of a locker freezer and as noisy as a clacking Model A Ford.
Every one of these pieces of equipment was crammed with vacuum tubes; they generated enough heat to serve a medium sized building. Now mind you, computers operate best when it is cool; they abhor heat so when it became too warm they would say, “It’s too hot here, I’m going to sleep. Call me when you manage to cool this room off.” And they shut down.
That is an extremely inconvenient situation when you’re trying to run a high-tech program, so, to try to prevent this, the building had been modified to raise the computer room some 16 inches, I believe, above the rest of that level. The space between the floor and the faux floor provided an opportunity to run the miles of cables and air conditioning conduits required by the equipment.
Whoever programmed the computer had a neat sense of humor. I was in the computer room one evening when something went wrong. The lights on the input station flashed once and then spelled out a single word. The printer clacked once and printed the same word. This gigantic, multi-million dollar pinball machine went “tilt” and quit.
I didn’t work directly with the computer; actually my job wasn’t so much different in substance that what I am doing today more than 50 years later. I operated a key punch machine that spewed out cards with rectangular holes as fast as I could type; not so very different from pounding my portable little keyboard today. I don’t know how many key punch stations there were; it took a lot to satisfy the appetite of six computers. Because we didn’t generate much heat, we could be housed in a room apart from the computers, themselves.
The weather analysts also had a separate room. They received data by teletype and plotted it in code on a map. Then they drew in the wavy lines, isobars and isotherms, indicating what kind of weather prevailed and where. Key punch converted this information to data the computers could handle.
All in all, it was a rather cumbersome affair but we were building the platform on which 21st Century weather prediction has been built. And it was fascinating.
By way of comparison, the workstation I am using right now has my computer on a shelf by my feet, a 20-inch monitor on the desk in front of me and my keyboard and mouse on a slide-out tray. My lap top is on the end of the desk but that area could just as well accommodate my printer; I have that on a separate table so it can serve both my PCs if I want. The entire arrangement is just about the size of my long-ago keypunch machine; the computing power is greater than all that equipment of the 50s. How times have changed - see ya.