Most Memorable Moment

Thanks for sharing the experience Sam. Interesting.

I was interested to read that Sam once met Grace Hopper.


Apart from Ada Lovelace and Grace herself, I suspect most of us would be hard pressed to name other women who have been prominent in computing history. However, there have been quite a few (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing for a list) including a contribution by the movie star, Hedy Lamarr.

For most of my four years in the Army I was stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia. It is an old fort; I lived in barracks inside a moat inside the fort; a moat is water around a (portion of a) fort to make attacks difficult. I won't dwell on that; it is not relevant here.

Fort Monroe is about 250 miles south of Washington, DC where the Pentagon is at. The Pentagon is the headquarters for all of the American military. There was one department at Fort Monroe that used a computer in the Pentagon. They needed a person to be on-site in the Pentagon to provide on-site support. So I lived in barracks next to the Arlington National Cemetery. On the other side of the cemetery is the Pentagon. I would go into the computer room and talk with the operators if that is what was needed. There was not much of a technical challenge. The computers in the Pentagon that I worked with were in the basement. There was one very large computer room with many IBM 370 types of "mainframe" computers. There were many reel-to-reel tape drives and disk drives. This was not all the computers in the Pentagon but there were many computers where I worked. I have no idea what departments (other than the one I was assigned to) that used the computers.

The department in Fort Monroe that I was assigned to communicated with the Pentagon using plain old analog phone lines and modems. At that time, 4800 bps was the fastest that modems were capable of. The data center in the Pentagon where I was at had a small room with about 50 modems. The modems were subject to overheating.

Back then, disk drives were much larger of course. They were roughly 4 foot high by 3 foot by 2 foot. So I guess that is approximately 1 square meter. The heads were separate from the platters and if the platters were removed from the drive, it was possible to touch the recording surface. It was relatively common for operators to unmount hard drive disks and mount another set of disks. I am explaining this because at the time, the Army was using economical drives and the disks were going bad faster than they should. I think the brand name of the drives was Itel (not Intel). One of the things that I did when it was necessary was to take the disks (not the drives) to a laboratory someplace where there as a huge magnet to degauss (erase) all the data on the disk before the disks were returned to the manufacturer.

I hope that this was interesting for most people. I think most of my experience in the Pentagon was technologically boring.

I met Grace Hopper once. I don't remember if I actually spoke with her. I did not realize how significant she was until after her presentation. She was a significant influence to the COBOL language and she is credited with having written the first compiler. The compiler compiled the FLOW-MATIC language and development of the compiler began at about the time I was born.  When I met her, she was giving a presentation of some type. I remember her giving all of us a nanosecond; actually a peice of wire cut to the length that light travels in a nanosecond.

She was also a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. I worked in the Pentagon for nearly a year before getting out of the Army. That was after I had attended her presentation. I remember visiting her office in the Pentagon. She was not there at the time but by then I had become familiar with her importance and it was an interesting moment to be in her office.

I remember her talking about how her department would "procure" supplies; they would see something in another office they needed and they would procure it, without paperwork and without even asking for it.