Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1665

nice to see a plug for us 'blue-collar' types. i had several jobs where i was encouraged to hire lots of degrees, even professors, and was often aware of the sameness of their approach when i would broach some off-the-wall idea or other. of course, it does help to know that certain problems aren't computable which may explain the pressure for multiple degrees as from what i've seen of undergraduate courses, not much theory is included anymore. but sometimes knowing what the problem is only gets in the way of solving it. i saw one airline pay pretty big bucks for nothing because nobody had learned about the travelling salesman problem in their CS courses.

around 1968 plus 1, about the time the US Surgeon General started warning about cigarettes, i had just quit university where about all i learned was how to smoke and have a good time. was surprised when parents made me get a job. sat in a room full of women (except for me) and double-checked market research reports on everything from toothpaste to sanitary napkins. i could check those reports faster than anybody. i don't really know why but the estimated sales figures for all those products that i didn't use or didn't use much seemed quite reasonable to me and i had lots of time left over to look around.

down the hall was a big glbutt-walled room full of machines and outside it was a big floor ashtray. all day long i would watch the crowd around it and they seemed to just smoke all day long too. one day, i asked somebody: "those people, what do they do?". one of the ladies, with a tone of reverence told me, "they work in the COMPUTER department". so i asked "how do i get in there?". she said, "oh, you write the test". there weren't many CS courses in those days.

the next thing i knew, i was loading racks of cards in the middle of the night, supervised by the former Ops' manager who had had a nervous breakdown and was trying to recover on the night shift. don't ask me what the logic behind this was. the DOS spooler, i think it was called 'Power', had just arrived and maybe because of being a former unit-record operator, he was always panicking. our shift reports (machine utilization) were terrible because he'd hit the 1052 console's REQUEST key again if the 360-40 didn't respond immediately and DOS would prompt with "REQUEST CANCEL" instead of the routine "REQUEST FOR COMMUNICATIONS". he thought the only allowable reply was "cancel", so we were constantly re-starting those long-running jobs. all the operators got measured on their shift efficiency. it was considered so important that some operators would doctor the run cards from the previous shift to 'steal' machine cycles.

one morning as i was leaving after my shift, the new manager grabbed my arm and told me he had bad reports from the old manager and that they were thinking of canning me but i could have two weeks grace on the day shift to see if i was salvageable. the old manager had been blaming all the problems on me!

in a way, i missed working with some of the night operators because we had lots of fun throwing that big rubber suction cup that the CE's used to pull raised floor tiles. some people could throw them 40 feet and make it stick. underhand and overhand too but you had to spin it just right. maintenance people used to get upset at the black rings they left on the glbutt walls. one of them was regularly placated because we had told him that we'd get the computer to pick horse race winners for him if he didn't tell on us. the 360 console switches were also used to keep score of the cribbage games. the big boss who was a real stuffed shirt and who everybody liked to make fun of behind his back, used to enter the machine room each morning to look at the shift reports. one night, one of the smarter-butted among us removed all the little light bulbs from the console, quite a few dozen of them i recall. in the morning the stuffed shirt came in and was noticeably non-plussed. the report looked good, but he knew there was something wrong. all the flashing lights were blank but he didn't realize it. all he knew was that he couldn't quite put his finger on just what was amiss and he was damned if he was going to lower himself by asking us what.

so, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, i'd go to the dumb waiter and unload boxes of cards, tapes and run instructions. some other people would appear from the third floor. they'd loiter about the machine room, yes, smoking cigarettes, and make smart-butted comments while i mounted tapes, loaded paper and dropped cards. in return, we'd write sarcastic comments on the run instructions when their jobs would 'abend'. you can guess the next question that occurred to me after a few months: "those people, what do they do?". answer, in the same reverent tone: "oh that's the PROGRAMMING department, et cetera, et cetera.

so i wrote the programmer's test and learned BAL, which the people i knew referred to as 'Branch And Link'. story of my life, sort of, and that of a few others i knew. the money was pretty good and half-decent BAL programmers could change jobs fairly easily, each time getting a nice raise. at the next job, i remember a PL-I programmer who was envious. when i asked why, he said it was because "you buttembler programmers know how the machine really works". i guess i didn't quite get his meaning because i certainly didn't think that. so i took some night courses in electric-electronic circuits. after a few weeks i realized that i could go for a PhD in electronics and still wouldn't know what an electron was.

in a way, i put it all down to smoking. and maybe it's just as well that i didn't continue with the electronics as since then they've discovered a whole bunch of little things besides electrons that the professors didn't know about then, muons and pesons and so forth.

oh and by the way, smoking in the machine room, at least during office hours, was eventually banned, at IBM's request after one too many head crashes. it still seems to me that more time was lost when the operators would mount the wrong pack and accidentally 'clobber SYSRES'.

pc