Monday, November 17, 2008

my background in computers

My first experience with computers was just out of high school. I got a summer job, as a good physics student, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, which was in its beginning stages of formation and hadn't even broken ground yet for the accelerator.

My boss was a physicist, Dr. David F. Sutter, from Cornell. Dave taught me the basics of circuits, and of logic. I was his only student. He would tutor me in his office. My own space was in an adjacent butler building, or large warehouse type structure. It was large and so was my space. Dave gave me a project to build a circuit, a high frequency clock. He stepped me through it at first and I finished it off. Then we debugged it together until it worked. I managed the lab supplies, getting requisitions for all the stuff Dave wanted us to have, getting some of it from the lab stock house, and ordering some of it from mail order catalogs, Allied and some other house. I learned to use the shop in the lab, drill press, band saw, bending machine, punch, etc. The manager of the shop was Bill Carter, a sturdy, unfrilled but warm and fatherly man, and he was very helpful. Another Cornell man came to work with us, Howie Pfeffer. He amazed me with his ability to debug quickly things I thought were real complicated. It always involved the oscilloscope because everything we did involved high frequencies.

Then I was put to work on my own project, a comparator and interrupt of a small minicomputer. I designed the circuit, with clear steering by dave, built it, and scouted out the computer interrupt. To do that I had to learn to program the computer in its own machine language. It was a Variandata 620i computer, with a language called DAS, for data assembly system. Another physicist, Chuck Schmidt, taught me how to run and program it. It was located in another building, supported by air pressure alone for some technical reason. You entered through a pressure-maintaining door.

i was thrilled with the work involving the computer. I picked it up real fast. One of the electronic technicians told me he was really impressed with how fast I picked it up.

There was a teletype terminal that I typed the programs with. It produced a paper tape that was fed into another input. The computer had switches on its frame that enabled you to step through your programs to debug them. These were called sense switches.

Then in the back there was an interface for the interrupt. My circuit had to connect to it there, and there were eight switches on my circuit. these created eight bits, zero or one each, that when the computer clock got to that number in eight bits, it was interrupted. This process was necessary to enable accelerator control to divert local control stations from their routine operations and have them do something special that came up, which it might in such a large machine. The accelerator was to be four miles in circumference.

That's all for this post.

while I'm waiting

While I'm waiting for action on my pinion, which I'm sure the general sentiment is that it will be when hell freezes over, I must advance on my business of computer consulting.

I was thinking about it and I believe there needs to be a clear difference made in my approach to people who, in the one case, want me to execute things for them and aren't interested in learning how to do much themselves, and in the other case, want me to teach them how to do things.

I would call the first case, where I execute things for them, a shadow service. In this case the client is a person totally without delusions about their computer skills, recognizes nevertheless the computer is a dandy thing, and wants to cash in on it any way he or she can. So he or she becomes a shadow sitting beside me and I become a shadow sitting beside him or her. Between us goes on all kinds of communication until we get the job done. But at the end of the session, the client is no different a person than he or she was at the beginning. I enter like a shadow and I exit like one. And he or she appears to me like a shadow too, except that in the process I have learned a lot about the person's needs and limitations of terminology and knowledge of computer processes.

The other type of client, who wants me to teach him or her how to do things on the computer, I will call simply a learner client. In this case really the door is wide open, anything is discussable, and the wider we set the agenda the more satisfied the client will eventually be. This of course requires also that my knowledge is much greater than the client's, and for many computer users this will just not be the case, and I will not be of use to him or to her. I am not a technician. I am a well-rounded scientist, and some people will find that useful and impressive, but some people will anticipate pretty much what that entails in terms of computer knowledge, and pass on it.

Next, a discussion of my background in computers.