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Bedrock
Computing
Written
June 2017

My
former high school classmate, Terry Rockhold, wrote me a long letter
in October 1967. We were now college juniors. He was at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and I was at Oberlin
College 34 miles to the southwest.
Terry
reported that his father was still on strike at a factory outside
Green Camp, Ohio. I have a hunch they are going to get
some new union leaders in elections this month!
And
he was following a municipal election in which Carl Stokes was
attempting to become Cleveland's first black mayor. According
to Terry, in the Democratic primary Stokes was expected to get 97% of
the black vote (that's what I call unity!), but not much
of the white vote. The previous time he ran, he received only
3% support from white voters. His primary opponent this time
was incumbent mayor Ralph Locher. |
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Racial
tensions had been rising in Cleveland. Stokes signs
(orange with black letters) are all over the place, Terry
reported. When you see a bunch of Locher signs (red and
blue), you know you're passing through a nationality area (Italian,
Slavic, etc.) Council candidates who support Stokes have orange
signs with black letters; those supporting Locher, red and blue.
Right now I'm picking Stokes (perhaps hoping is a better word), but
it's going to be awfully close.
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Stokes
did win the primary. And in the 1967 general election the next
month against Seth Taft, Stokes was able to add 20% of the white vote
to his black base, achieving a narrow 50.5% majority. |
Every
college had at least one computer by 1967, but it was still the
Stone Age. Oberlin's number cruncher was a big IBM mainframe
that lived in a climate-controlled cave in the basement of the
physics building. I think it served the college
administration's needs, but we physics students could use it too. |
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However,
we couldn't simply log on from a laptop. We had to write out
our program using the Fortran
language and take the coding sheet to another room in the basement.
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That
room housed keypunch machines like this one. We would
laboriously type in each line of our program, and the machine would
noisily punch holes in IBM cards, one card for each line.
Then
we'd carry the stack of cards to the door of the computer's lair and
hand it to one of the acolytes who dwelt therein.
(Many
of those acolytes had been hijacked from the college radio
station. Once upon a time, Oberlin College's best and brightest
nerds had hung out at WOBC, building and maintaining the electronic
equipment. But then the computer age arrived. To tend to
the IBM's needs, the college stole away WOBC's nerds and actually paid them.) |
The
attendants would feed our stack of cards to the computer, which
would read each card by sensing the locations of the holes and then
attempt to run the encoded program. After maybe an hour, we'd
get our cards back along with a printout of our results.
Usually we'd made some mistake, so we'd have to do some more
keypunching and resubmit the stack.
Over
at Case, Terry Rockhold was beginning to work toward an MBA
degree. In his October letter, he enclosed a spare IBM
card. As you might guess from the card, he wrote,
I spent yesterday playing with, uh, using the
computer. It was my first time, and I really got a kick out of it.
It
was a program to read the hours worked, hourly rate, number of
exemptions, and voluntary deductions of a worker and to output a wage
statement. The first time I ran it through the computer, the
output was exactly like I wanted it, but I got six diagnostic
messages in the program. I found that I had put a PRINT
message in the wrong columns and that I had forgotten to put a )
at the end of one of my FORMAT statements.
I
retyped the two cards, ran them through the computer, and got one
diagnostic message. After talking to one of the other guys, I
found out what was wrong and was ready to run it again, when the
computer broke down. That put both printers out of action for
about twenty minutes.
Finally,
I got the thing run through perfectly and left. It was then
that it dawned on me that I had been so wrapped up doing the blasted
thing that I had forgotten to go to one of my classes!
Another
friend, Jack Heller, had recently transferred from Oberlin to Ohio
State. I'll major in electrical engineering and advanced
typing, he wrote me that month. So now, besides
math I take chemistry, engineering graphics (glorified drafting), and
engineering mechanics (computer programming).
At
OSU, Fortran
is processed using PUFFT (Purdue University Fast Fortran
Translator) and other languages such as FAP, OSUY, and AGWYG (AlGo
Where You Go, yuk, yuk).
They
have a 7904 here which is voluntarily shut down every Friday for maintenance.
It
takes five hours for your program to be run, and you only get one
chance a day. |
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