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.