Post date: Sep 24, 2016 1:01:29 AM
When I was a senior undergraduate, the Chemistry department was given a computer. At the time it was natural to lock this machine in a computer room. When the Fall semester started, R Nelson Smith, the department head and teacher of Physical Chemistry for seniors, gave all of us (about 15) a key to the computer room, doubled the homework, and told us, “You must learn to use the computer or you won’t pass the class.”
So we learned to use this computer, which was the size of a desk, ran on vacuum tubes, and was programed by plugging jumper wires into a printed circuit board. The only input was a ten-key adding machine. The output was an early IBM Selectric typewriter.
That would have been 1960-61. I did not use anything like a computer again until 1973. I had recently moved to Boston and needed some work. I looked at the Harvard-MIT computer lab, where a graduate political science student needed some Turkish voting behavior analyzed. Using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) I determined that social-economic factors determined voting behavior. Too simple.
About a year later I was working for a large roofing company in Boston. Roofing mostly uses petroleum products (bitumen, asphalt). This was shortly after the Arab oil embargo, and all petroleum-based products were rising in price. The roofing company wanted to justify an increase in contract price for the Albany (NY) South Mall — a multi-block construction project for which we had the roofing and waterproofing contract.
The first time we calculated the needed increase in price it took three of us six weeks of calculations. But the price of oil products kept rising. So I asked the Olivetti salesman if we could borrow an early desktop calculator. It took two of us two weeks to compute all the same data with higher prices. About this time the roofing company converted its job costing to a simple magnetic-stripe-memory computer. The employee tax reports came out in three days instead of stretching to the end of the allowable period. I was pretty much convinced of the value of computers.
This oil embargo put a big damper on the economy of New England, so we figured it was time for me to go back to school. As an assistantship, I was handed a box of program cards and told to have the backcountry hiking permits from four NW national parks keypunched and analyze the results each month. I pestered the help desk personnel at University of Washington and learned FORTRAN — enough to add graphics to the results.
When deciding the basis for my dissertation in Forestry, I had discovered published research results in about six articles from the same lab on the same subject. Each of the results was an algebraic formula that made no physical sense and each formula was of a different form — even though the physical process that produce the data was the same: cooking wood chips of different shapes, sizes, and species to form wood pulp. To me this looked like a chance to apply some basic physics, chemistry, and statistical analysis via a computer program.
Once I had my degree I was able to get a job, but that job was essentially chemistry, ignoring all the economics, forestry, and statistics that I had learned. However, I soon learned that the department did not need a chemist, and that I was the one person in the department most comfortable around computers.
Five years later, when it came time (once again) to figure out what I would do when (or if) I grew up, I surmised that computers would probably still pay in ten or twenty years.
That assumption held well. And it held long enough for me to retire at age 72.
I still occasionally act as consultant on computer or network issues with friends. But I don’t ask for pay.