(Approx. 780 words)

Memorials and Memories
By Charlie Sickels, Managing Editor, Hard-Copy, Chicago Computer Society
www.ccs.org
wsickels(at)sbcglobal.net

Obtained from APCUG with the author's permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

In the US, the end of May is a national time for remembering people and events, a time to recall and to honor.  Some of it is public; some is personal; it is all profound and deeply felt.  It is well and good that we should engage in this process.  It is affirming and appropriate that we honor what is worthwhile and often bought at heavy cost.  Our lives and society have been affected for good or ill by what has gone before.  Some will come again and it is up to us to learn from the past and keep watch on the future.

No less profound, but with less emotional content, is the march of technological progress.  This journal is concerned with many aspects of personal computing, what it does and can do, what we believe it will do if properly managed, where it will go.  But this may also be a time to consider where it has been, not necessarily how it got here, just what it was like in an earlier era.

Those of us of a certain maturity and extended contact at whatever level with the world of computing can surely recall many steps along the way, glimpses both trivial and meaningful on the decades-long path we have trod.  Let us try a hasty and hazy recollection of those steps and share some here.  We refer to the earlier and later days of what has become both common in our lives and essential to them.  We speak not of the Cray and Lord knows what other supercomputers are now extant, whether acknowledged or secret, but of the early surge in size and power, names like Burroughs,  RCA, Honeywell, and the prince destined to be king, IBM.  

We may all remember the Big Iron years of heavily air conditioned big rooms of big machines with rows of tape drives the size of refrigerators, all color matched in IBM Blue, IBM Red, or IBM Gray.  Spinning inch-wide tape reels were the size of huge dinner plates and gave way in time to the real and early floppy disks.  The machines were handled by skillful computer operators and used information digitally coded by intense computer programmers, the new elite career of the time which sheltered nerds and geniuses alike from the world of the commonplace.

Changes came.  Evolution brought “distributed processing”, which evolved into microcomputers still with linkage to the heavy hardware and equipped with the arcane language of DOS.  Then massive increases in memory capacity enabled the Graphical User Interface, GUI, and the dam began to give way.  GUI and Windows fostered independent personal computers, growing from ever increasing memory, speed, and what vendors loved to proclaim, “increased productivity”.  Then, being linked to the wondrous Internet made having a home computer as reasonable as having a car.  Or two.  Fame and fortune has shifted to the little machines spread throughout the land, their developers, their makers, and their users,  In our marvels of expanded access to information and communication, this can be a time to pause and honor those who made it all possible by many years of work and logical choices.  Most of them are not famous and I do not know their names, but no less do them honor.  Those who are famous already have what they deserve, or more.  

In honoring ingenuity, I’d like to relate a lesser-known incident from the early days of Big Iron’s reign.  IBM was establishing new information hubs at major international cities.  The Paris center was having mysterious problems with new information tapes and periodic updates.  Emergency calls for replacements brought new tapes and similar though slightly different problems.  They were undamaged but still faulty.  Poughkeepsie sent an international systems engineering team to Paris to discover the problem’s cause and find a solution.  They carried a fresh set of calibrated tapes proven functional.  They watched them disappear into and re-emerge from French Customs, whereupon they too proved faulty.  

Careful inspection revealed that the tapes were a bit shorter.  Sure enough, the suspicious French Customs officials were routinely clipping several meters from the start of every tape for later analysis.  With this deduction, IBM simply moved the initialization instructions some fifty feet deeper preceded by sacrificial random data.  Success was immediate.  No protestations needed; no excuses received; no announcements made.  We also honor enterprise. 

This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).