CP/M

The first home computer I ever bought ran with a CP/M operating system. It was a small computer, containing two floppy disc drives (a big deal at the time, for which I had to pay extra). The monitor and keyboard were both extra components to be bought. I bought a CP/M system because I wasn't very impressed with the DOS systems that were then available. Little did I know!

At the time, I had a boyfriend named Dave, who was a computer scientist. He bought a DOS computer, which was his first home computer, except for a computer he had built himself. He called it the "POS-1," (standing for "Piece of 'Shit-1). After he bought his first DOS system, he gave the POS-1 to my two younger sons.

Together, Dave and I wrote a book, Algorithms for Personal Computing. Creating the manuscript was difficult, because my CP/M system was different than Dave's DOS system. Dave would write a program in BASIC, then add explanatory comments. I would then take the program, copied onto a 5-1/4" inch floppy disc, and translate it into a format my computer could read. Then I'd edit Dave's text commentaries.

The book is long out of print, and yet, I've found that it now sells in used-book sites for about $45. It was only $14.95 when it was first printed.

ARPANET

While I was working at the Navy research lab, my brother was also working there, as a research scientist in the civil service. In fact, he had been working there for several years. In his work, he was one of the users of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.

ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became DARPA, for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

This early system allowed its users to upload and download files from mainframe computers located at various government facilities and universities. It also allowed users to run programs on computers remotely, and it soon allowed email among the users. I never got to use ARPANET. By the time I got online, the Internet had superseded it.

Punch Cards

While I was working at the Navy research lab, I decided to take a class in the programming language Fortran, which was being offered by my employer. After the first couple of sessions of class, we were given an assignment to write a simple program to calculate our average gas mileage. For the next class session, we were instructed to bring a stack of punch cards with the program punched into it.

At the lab where I was working, I saw a bank of keypunch machines that were available "on demand." So I went there and diligently punched my program into a machine, and picked up my punch cards.

At the next session of class, our instructor took us to a room that contained a card reader, a large, complex machine that would read our punch cards and transmit the information to a mainframe computer somewhere. However, when my deck of cards went into the machine, they simply disappeared. They didn't come back out, and the machine gave no sign of having read them.

The instructor finally figured out that the keypunch machine I used was a slightly different variety than the kind needed for this card reader. I would have to punch a new set of cards on a different machine that was in the corporate building. This annoyed me greatly, because I would have to make a special trip across town from the lab where I worked to the corporate building.

However, before I managed to do that, my mother died. I was so grief-stricken, I didn't have the heart to go through with that class, and so I never learned to program in Fortran, although I was able to read it when I was writing a document for a Fortran program.

Paperless office

Almost immediately after we moved back to San Diego, Don and I decided to get a divorce. With the help of my brother and his wife, I bought a condo near Don's house. I started looking for a job, and soon found one at a company with Computer in its name, although the work I was doing as a technical writer didn't require me to use a computer. At first, I didn't even have any access to a computer.

Then, while I was working for a client of the company at a Navy research lab, we learned about a computer we could access directly, by phone line, and we decided that we'd set up a "paperless office," a dream that remains unfulfilled in any office I know of.

This particular computer was called a PDP-11. I don't know any of its technical capabilities, but I remember that to access it by phone, we used a 300-baud modem, which was so slow it was almost unbearable. However, the computer did have a CRT terminal and keyboard, instead of punch cards and reels of magnetic tape for input and output. My job was to type in the information for the projects we were working on, and format the documents so the manager could easily view them on his terminal. Formatting the documents was very tricky. It required including a lot of codes in the document for line indents, line spacing, and so on. And, of course, in the end, the documents always had to be printed and stored in file drawers. So much for the paperless office.

Microprocessors

After I lost my job at the company that manufactured stand-alone word processors, I was delighted to get a job where I could use my French. I became the department secretary for a special project at a company that manufactured semiconductors of all kinds. The special project was devoted to a contract to design and equip a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Algeria, for an arm of the Algerian government. Part of the contract required training about 50 Algerian engineers and technicians how to operate the new factory that was being built.

As a result, I learned about many aspects of manufacturing semiconductors, although I wasn't using a computer in my job. During this interval, the first microprocessors were being developed -- a "computer on a chip." This meant that the entire circuitry for a computer was now available on one integrated circuit.

However, that didn't mean that all you needed was one
integrated circuit. Oh, no. It needed to connect to other devices for input, output, and storage. While I was working for the semiconductor company, I went to the "company store" and bought a "computer in a notebook" for Don. It was a literal three-ring notebook, containing pages of information and instructions, and a plastic three-ring zip-lock bag containing a small printed circuit board and various semiconductor devices. Don would have to attach the pieces and somehow attach the "computer" to a keyboard and terminal and so on.

About that time we decided to move from Silicon Valley back to San Diego. Once again, Don got a job that would pay for our move. We didn't want to move the kids in the middle of the school year, so Don moved to San Diego and roomed with a friend, while the kids and I stayed in Sunnyvale until the end of the school year.

Large Scale Integration (LSI)

About the time I started working in the electronics industry was about the time Large Scale Integration (LSI) was developing enough to create successful automated production lines that could produce it. It carried much more circuitry than small and medium scale integrated circuits. And manufacturing LSI circuits was very difficult. I once worked at a temporary job as a secretary, where one of my duties was to calculate the total percentages of successful production on different days, using variable procedures. At each step of processing, some percentage of the "chips" on a wafer of silicon failed. And at the next step, some other percentage failed. At each step, the total percentage of failures of total chips on the original wafer became bigger and bigger. The total percentage of successful chips fabricated might be around one percent, or less, of the original potential chips on the wafer.

Word Processing

After I finally completed my B.A., I decided to get a job. All the children were in school by then, and I wanted to do something professional.

I got a job as the "word-processing secretary" with a small company that manufactured a computer system devoted exclusively to word processing. The included a gas plasma screen, "international orange" in color, with white letters. The company had devoted a lot of research to the subject, and decided that the orange and white display was easiest on the eyes. The display was of the WYSIWYG type, years before that term was coined, and years before any other computer system offered it.

A short time after I started working there, a huge international company bought it. But that turned out not to be important to me, because when I came up for my 3-month review, I was let go. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with my work, or even keeping up with my work; it was because I "took off too much time" to take care of my children when they got sick. I don't think that would be allowed now.

I felt devastated, but it turned out that it freed me up to take another job that was ideal for me.

Minicomputers

The first time I ever had hands-on experience with a computer was for a math class I was taking. I had always hated math, and avoided math classes. However, in order to complete my B.A., I had to take one.

Fortunately, I had a wonderful teacher for this class, which he had designed specifically for liberal arts students. I finally realized that I didn't hate math, but I had always had terrible teachers for math. With this class, I became very interested in the subject.

This teacher gave us an assignment that absolutely required using a calculator. The school had a math lab, with desktop calculators. I seldom had an opportunity to use Don's pocket calculator, because he needed it for work.

The teacher also gave us an assignment for which we had to use a computer. This computer was a minicomputer, which was much smaller (and cheaper) than a mainframe. We didn't have to program it or anything complex like that. We simply had to log in and work on our assignment, which our teacher had programmed.

Even though the computer had a keyboard like a typewriter, using it seemed very different from typing on a typewriter. It felt different, and looking at a display on a CRT seemed very different from looking at a sheet of paper. Nevertheless, I managed to complete the assignment. And that was my introduction to using a computer.

Calculators

After several years in Minnesota, we moved back to California, to the San Francisco Bay area. Again, Don got a job that would pay for our move. I don't remember what he was working on at the time. It was something for a military contract.

What I do remember is that he bought a scientific pocket calculator. Pocket calculators were new on the market, and were expensive. As a scientific calculator, the one Don bought included many more functions than basic arithmetic. It cost about $300, and that was at a discount he got through his job.

Today, calculators are so cheap, they might be giveaways. Or at little cost, they can perform all or many of the operations Don's scientific calculator could. While calculators are not computers, they provide an example of how advanced miniaturization had become. And it continued to advance. Integrated circuits became more and more powerful, with ever more circuits in each one.

Terminals

Don didn't like his new job, but he had to remain at it for six months, or else we would have to reimburse his employer for the money it cost to move us to Minnesota. So he stuck it out, and we bought a farm. As soon as the six months were over, he started looking for another job, and soon found one.

However, his new job was much further away from where we lived, and he had to spend about two hours a day commuting. We decided to sell our farm and buy a different one, that was closer to his new job. I won't go into the details, but it took a long time, and we ended up buying a house in a suburb of Minneapolis for a few months, and then we bought another farm.

I don't remember the main products of the company where Don went to work when he first started there. However, I remember his crowning achievement there. He designed the world's first "intelligent" terminal for computer systems. Now, all computers were still mainframes. For people to interact with them, aside from using spools of magnetic tape and using line printers for output, the terminals they used were Teletype machines. They had a typewriter keyboard and a printer, but everything was printed in upper case, and they had only a few punctuation marks.

Don designed a new terminal that allowed lower case letters and the punctuation marks that appear on the row of numbers on a keyboard. Don was very proud of his design, because, he told me, every key had four functions. To get a lower-case letter, you simply pressed a key. To get an upper-case letter, you pressed Shift and a key, the same as a typewriter. In addition, they keyboard had a special key that changed the function of a letter key if you pressed and held it while pressing a letter key, and if you pressed the Shift key and the special key and a letter key at the same time, it performed a special function, such as cut or copy or paste. In effect, Don invented the Control key.

At the time, I thought that was much too much for an operator to remember. I couldn't imagine the way future computers would use this facility. However, the new terminals were a huge success. Among other customers, the University of California bought them for all its big computer systems. And they set the pattern for all future computer terminals.

Moving on

1968 was such a turbulent year that Don and I decided to move to a farm in Minnesota. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and rioting broke out in major cities all across the country. Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated, followed by rioting in Chicago during the Democratic convention. We thought living on a farm, out in the country, would be safer than living in a city.

We had two little boys, and I was expecting our third child late in 1968. We wanted to raise our children in a safe environment, away from all the problems of big cities. We had a dream, that Don would get an engineering job with a big computer company, which would pay to move our family back to the Twin Cities area. We'd buy a family farm, and operate it so it would pay its own way and provide a living for us. Then, Don would quit his job working as an employee, and we'd open up a stoneware pottery studio, and live as artists.

I know this doesn't say much about computers, but it was the reason we decided to move to Minnesota. Don was raised in Sioux Falls, SD, and he wanted to move there, but I wasn't willing. Sioux Falls didn't seem like a big enough city to me. I was willing to live on a farm, but only if it were within easy driving distance of a major city, with venues for theatre and the arts. Also, the Twin Cities supported a thriving community of computer companies.

We subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and began reading the ads for computer engineers. We mailed numerous resumes. Finally, Don got a job that met our needs, so we sold our house, packed up our three little boys, and flew off to the Twin Cities, with a stop in Sioux Falls along the way, so we could visit with some of Don's family.

When we arrived, we were assigned to a motel near the factory where Don would work, because our furniture was being shipped across country. The first day Don went to work, leaving me and the three little ones in a motel room, not knowing anyone, and with no way to go anywhere without Don. When Don arrived back at the motel, he said the first thing his new boss told him was, "We're going to move this whole division to Sunnyvale. Do you want to move out there?"

Don told him no, we were still in the process of moving to the Twin Cities. As a result, the company was supposed to give him a comparable job of equal responsibility and opportunity. However, Don said, there was no comparable job on other computer systems, because this one was being designed to be the world's biggest and fastest.

Nevertheless, he took a job they offered him, designing a drum memory for a lesser computer. He quickly got bored with this job, because he quickly made designs that would only later be integrated with other parts of the system. He then had nothing to do for 18 months, while other parts of the system were being designed, and he would get feedback on what he had done months before.

Engineer

Even after Don finished his B.A., his employer wouldn't promote him to the position of engineer. After all, he hadn't actually majored in engineering. In fact, he hadn't even taken any classes in engineering. He completed his degree with a do-it-yourself major called a General Major, with emphasis in Physics, Math, and Psychology. I later completed my B.A. with a similar major, which was then called Liberal Studies, in my case with emphasis in French, English, and History. Much later, our oldest son graduated with a major in Liberal Studies, with emphasis in Political Science, English, and History.

Anyway, Don still wanted to be an engineer, so he started looking for a different job. Then he found one where he would be an engineer, make more money, and it was much closer to our home.

This company did not manufacture computers. Instead, it manufactured electrical test equipment. Don went to work there, and applied integrated circuits to his design. He designed the world's first digital voltmeter. That means that instead of a dial with a needle pointing to the voltage of a circuit being tested, it had a numeric display.

After the digital voltmeter, Don designed the world's first digital ammeter, ohmmeter, and multimeter, which combined the three functions in one instrument.

Integrated Circuits

I still remember the first time I ever saw an integrated circuit. Don brought one home from work and showed it to me. It was a small, black plastic rectangle, with two rows of metallic "feet." Don told me it contained thousands of tiny transistors and other components. It was equal to a printed-circuit card, with all its attached transistors, diodes, and so on.

I was amazed that such a tiny object could do so much. Integrated circuits were the next step in making electronics technology smaller and smaller. They truly changed the world, just as transistors had done.

Technical Writer

By that time, Don had completed his B.A., and wanted to be promoted to the position of engineer. He had advanced from being a technician to being a technical writer. In fact, he became a group leader in the technical publications department. That was my introduction to technical writing as an occupation, although I had a cousin who had been a technical writer for some time. Don sometimes brought home some of his work for editing. He said, "A technical writer writes in the second person imperative." He showed me a document about the "Fog Index," a way of measuring how hard to read a text is. Basically, it means that long, complex sentences are harder to read than direct, basic sentences, and long words are harder to read than short words. It presented a formula for calculating how hard it is to read a text, in terms of grade-level in school. In other words, for a technical writer, shorter is better. That became one of my abiding rules when I later became a technical writer.

I think Don was good at technical writing, but he couldn't get the promotion to engineer that he wanted. So he started looking for another job.

Network Switching

At another time, the big excitement of the factory was that they had just installed a huge new computer for one of the major television networks. It was going to take over the job of switching between the network and the local stations. Now that I think about it, I realize how archaic that sounds -- a time when all TV programs were broadcast, not on cable, and they were virtually all offered by one of three major networks

The evening they switchover was scheduled, Don and I watched the show on that network leading up to the moment of the change. When the show finished at 10:00 p.m., in that brief pause between "The End" and the commercial, we heard a man's voice say, "'Balls', said the queen. 'If I had two, then I'd be king.'"

Don and I stared at each other with our jaws dropping open. Apparently, a technician at one of the switching points didn't know he was on the air.

Hot Strip Rolling Mill

Don also worked full time at the computer factory. One time he told me about a new computer they had built and installed for a hot-strip rolling mill. That is, a steel factory, where the computer would control huge buckets of molten steel, pour them out, and roll them into long, uniform strips.

The operator for this mill sat in a special cage hanging far above the factory floor. An operating rule was that any time the operator came down to the floor, as in time for breaks or change of shift, the mill had to be shut down, a procedure that was long and complex. The procedure to start it up again was also long and complex. To enforce this rule, the engineers had designed, and the technicians had built, a "dead-man's switch" for the cab. It was set so that the mill could not operate unless a weight equal to a human body were on the floor of the cab.

As it turned out, one operator figured out how to fool that switch. The next time the strip of steel started to buckle, and needed to be straightened out manually, this operator placed a heavy weight on the floor of the cab, so that he could climb down the ladder to the factory floor, where he fell into the strip of molten steel.

Don said, "We can make them fool proof, but we can't make them damned fool proof."

Technician

When we got married, Don was an electronics technician, with the goal of becoming an engineer. In electronics, technicians assembled things engineers designed. In his work, Don was responsible for attaching small, discrete components, such as diodes, transistors, and capacitors, onto printed circuit boards (PCBs), and for attaching the PCBs together. I don't think he personally soldered all the many piece-parts onto the PCBs, but he oversaw a group of "wiring girls," who performed the actual assembly.

I suppose the original wiring girls of World War II attached actual copper wire to the sockets for the vacuum tubes, but when transistors replaced vacuum tubes, the actual circuits were printed onto a substrate, forming PCBs. The individual active components were soldered onto the PCBs. Then some number of finished PCBs were wired together into a subassembly. Finally, all the subassemblies were wired together.

Don wanted to become an engineer, but had not yet earned a bachelor's degree. As a veteran of the Korean War, he used the G.I. Bill to support himself while he earned an A.A. degree at a city college. Then he went on toward a B.A. at a state college. After his G.I. Bill funding ran out, he continued to take night classes, while working full time. I, too, was a student at the college, in my senior year when we got married. He continued to take classes at night, while I went to school full time.

Oil-field Computer

The year before Don and I got married, he had been assigned to go install a computer and its peripherals in an oil field near Cody, WY. I think he spent about three months there, and became friends with several men who worked for the oil company.

The year after we got married, he was again assigned to go install some computer equipment there. We decided for me to go with him. So, instead of him flying, we packed up our car, and off we went. Along the way, we drove through Yellowstone National Park. Cody is called "the east gate of Yellowstone." As it happened, we got to the site of "Old Faithful" just in time to see it erupt. Staying in Cody for six weeks, we took several trips to the park.

When we arrived in Cody, we rented a motel room with a kitchenette, so we could eat there instead of going out somewhere for every meal. Don had called one of the friends he'd met the year before, and he invited us to his home for dinner. I think we went there the first night we were in Cody.

By the time we made this trip, I was pregnant with our first child. That friend's wife lent me her sewing machine, so I could make clothing for the new baby. So that's how I spent my time there, making baby clothes and maternity clothes. I made matching dresses for Valkyrie and me, plus a matching dress for her Barbie doll.

The computer Don was working on was still a mainframe, and its peripherals were also huge. Shown here is one of our old photos Don took, showing the inside of the oil-field computer shack. I don't know exactly what component of the computer was inside that shack, but as you can see, it was very large.

After six weeks in Cody, we could hardly wait to get home, to go on to the next phase of our lives together.

Acronyms

Then, as now, the computer industry generated many acronyms. Don explained to me about RAM and ROM, Random Access Memory and Read-Only Memory. I can't remember how much memory those big old computers had, but RAM was still being measured in kilobytes (KB), and operating speed was measured in kilohertz. Now, my home computer has 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM, and it's processing at 2.99 gigahertz (GHz) . Just imagine, all our PCs are more powerful than those giant mainframes of 40-some years ago. I virtually never hear anything about ROM anymore, but it's in there.

In those days, computers didn't have floppy disk drives. They used spools of magnetic tape to enter data and record it after the computer processed it. I'm not even talking about punch cards now, because I didn't need to know anything about them until many years later.

The big deal for computer memory in those days was a drum memory. Just as it sounds, it was a cylinder where data could be stored -- on the surface of the cylinder, not dumped in a pile in its hollow center.

I don't remember any more acronyms from those ancient days, so that's all for now.

Transistors

One evening after we got married, Don took me and his little daughter, Valkyrie, to the factory. She was about three and a half, a cute little girl with white-blond hair and big blue eyes. He wanted to take her picture with a Polaroid camera they used for making photos of the screen of an oscilloscope. The camera lens had a black metal tube around it, about the size of a small coffee can, so they could attach it directly to the oscilloscope, blocking out all the ambient light.

Don couldn't figure out how to remove the tube from the camera, so he took her picture through it. When it developed, her face shone brightly out of an illuminated circle, surrounded by black. She looked at it and said, "Oh, I'm a sun Valkyrie." Decades later, for her birthday I gave her one of those Mexican sun images you might see on a wall. She immediately remembered that photo.

The big deal for making computers then was transistors, those remarkable little devices that replaced vacuum tubes. They looked like little metal top hats, with three wires sticking out the bottom. Don brought home a bunch of them that had been "excessed" at work. They were expensive, in the range of $30-$40 apiece. But I guess the prices had fallen, and his employers didn't think they were worth the effort to determine their type and power levels. So Don brought them home. (He still had a bunch of old vacuum tubes he had brought home from his previous employer, and he kept hauling them around from garage to garage as we moved here and there.)

He wanted to use the transistors, so he designed and built an electronic machine to test them. Then he wanted me to sit there and test them. The first part of the test was easy. I'd plug them into a socket on the machine, which indicated whether they were NPN or PNP. (That's negative-positive-negative or positive-negative-positive, referring to the three little wires.) Having figured out that much, then I was supposed to turn a dial that controlled the power going into the transistor being tested. I had to watch a needle on a numeric dial, and when it reached a certain value, I was supposed to turn off the power.

However, that was a very tricky operation, and I burned out a lot of transistors. I was happy to be relieved of that responsibility.

Analog computers

My late husband, Don, was a computer technician, back in the days when all computers were mainframes, even back in the days of analog computers, which used vacuum tubes. Most people now don't even know what that means.

Vacuum tubes were the devices that made radios and TVs work, in those long-ago days. (When something went wrong with your radio or TV, you had to look in the back of the set for a "black" tube, then take it to a store (usually a big drugstore), where you could plug it into a machine that told you what model-number tube you needed. You then bought the tube from the friendly store clerk, who knew virtually nothing about TVs or radios or their tubes. Then you took it home and replaced it yourself.

Before we were married, Don took me to his place of employment, one evening, where they manufactured big (of course) mainframe computers; there weren't any other kind. He didn't really show me anything I could understand, except that he sat down and quickly wrote a small program (probably in BASIC) that made the printer print out, over and over, "Don loves Toni."

In those days, all printers were "line printers," which printed out "whatever" one line at a time, in dot-matrix format, on special folded-paper, usually with green and white horizontal stripes, with left and right margins consisting of a strip with holes in them, to allow the printer to advance the paper one line at a time. After whatever was printed, you had to strip off the margins and tear the pages apart. The paper was punctured appropriately, to make the whole process easier.

I was suitably impressed.

After he printed out some number of pages, Don stopped the program from printing. Then, instead of deleting the program, he changed it so that it would then print out "I love you."

So that was my introduction to computers.