University Of Akron Computer Center Circa 1977

As I said I was going to do a few days ago, I went to my brothers house over the weekend. That explains the few days missing from my blog. We had a blast there, but that is a subject for a future blog entry. Anyway, I scanned in about 75 slides. I suspect I have more somewhere, but that is all I found and took on this trip. I used his $100 HP 3970 scanjet to scan in my slides. I am impressed with that scanner. It rocked. It was slow, but I am happy with the output. Before I show some of the pictures, I think a little history is in order.

It is funny how life turns out. If you would have asked a young high school senior Jim Cook what he was going to be doing for the rest of his life, he probably would have said something to do with electronics. Well, that isn’t where I ended up. I graduated from Minerva High School which coincidentally is in Minerva Ohio in 1975. I went to college that fall to the University Of Akron to study Electronic Technology. Shortly after I was on campus I learned about their computer center and started playing the games they had on their mainframe computer. I was fascinated, took their online self study course on programming computers using a language called APL and was quickly hooked. I realized that I wanted to become a computer programmer for a living and spend most of my time — easily 12+ hours a day in Simmons Hall working on the computer terminals. I quickly became skilled at computer programming and by the spring of 1976 I was working as a student assistant at the computer center. My job initially was to assist Marge Dufala, my 1st manager, with APL programming activities. I also started to take computer programming classes and was quickly learning other languages like Fortran, Cobol and Assembler. I think it was over Christmas break in 1976–1977 I switched student assistant jobs and worked for the operating system software group. While I hated to leave Marge as she was an excellent boss, I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about computers. I couldn’t have imagined a better 1st boss than Marge and the knowlege she gave me gave me an excellent foundation for the rest of my career. Being a software group student assistant had it’s perks, one of which was access to “The Platform”. The Platform is the raised floor machine room in which the university mainframe computer was housed. I would love to go up there and pester the operators and have them teach what they were doing. They were very generous with their knowledge and quickly trained me to be there unofficial apprentice. On the weekends, they would take long lunch breaks and leave me in charge of this million dollar equipment. I was in heaven and I think they thought of themselves as Tom Sawyer getting me to white wash their fences. But I didn’t mind. It was funzor!

So that is the background — and here are my pictures.

This first picture is young punk me operating the multi-million dollar computer. This computer is an IBM 370/158 mainframe with a whopping 1 megabyte of main memory. This photo is unaltered from the scan.

Notice the severe blue color shift from the fluorescent lighting. I had no idea about white balance back then. I do now and with a little photoshop magic, voila, a much better photo:

Boy I wish I had a digital camera and photoshop back then. Here I am 20 years old running this ginomous computer. I learned that word from Michael. Melissa says I look like 12 years old here. I need to show her what I looked like at 12 years old. I don’t know who took this picture of me but I am thinking it was one of the operators.

This next picture was taken from about the middle of the machine room so this represents about 1/4 of the raised floor space. The machines in the lower left are 3330 disk drives. They could hold 100 megabytes of data.

This is a picture of a 1401 card reader. Back in those days most programs and input data were recorded on punched card decks and read into a the computers memory via a card reader. The hopper on the right is where the cards were put in and read.

I have no idea what I was doing in this next picture. Maybe checking for a paper jam? This machine is a 1403 printer. It could print whole lines at a time and I think it printed 1400 lines a minute. It was extremely noisy when the cover was not down.

One of my favorite machines was the Calcomp plotter. This is a 3 pen plotter and would draw on the paper. It was fun to watch it draw the images I would create. You can see the 3 pens on the top of the paper to the left.

This is an IBM 3705 machine. All remote terminals on the campus was connected to the main computer via this machine.

Lest you think I am a total geek and nerd who only took pictures of computer equipment (which I certainly was back then — and probably still am), I did take pictures of people as well. Here is a photo of Bill Hetler. He was the lead computer operator. We used to have great fun together. One day we were in the Machine Room singing a song. I think it was the Jimmy Buffet song “Volcano”. We thought we were most excellent singing it until the telephone rang and Bill answered it. It was from the administrative offices next door asking us to quit singing so that they could get some work done. We laughed till our sides hurt on that one.

This isn’t a picture from the machine room. This is Marge Dufala, my first manager. She is in a student terminal room and she is haming it up a bit for the camera. Notice the IBM selectric terminal on the right. This is what we used to program APL. Speaking of Marge, she was working on a statistical software that she was creating that she called ADEPT. I needed to look up the word at that time to see what it meant. Well, recently I wrote a Agile Project Management system that I used the acronym of ADEPT for. Thanks for the idea Marge!

This next picture is of Nanette Norton. Nanette was an I/O girl. An I/O girl (there wasn’t any I/O Boy’s), was a computer center student employee who sat behind a caged window with a reasonable sized slot in which students could pass them their card decks with their computer programs on them. The I/O girl would put the deck in a card reader, wait for the output to be printed (could be up to hours later), put the output and the card deck together in a bin, and then give the deck and printout to the student when they returned.

I would take pictures of all of the I/O girls. Some I/O girls were more agreeable to have their pictures taken than others. Here is a picture of Kim Wargo. Kim was much more willing to have her photos taken and I probably took more photos of her than any other I/O girl. I suspect that she was so willing because she needed a diversion from the super boring mind numbing duties of an I/O girl. Kim is sitting on top of a 1403 printer. I wonder if we would have got in trouble if someone of importance would have caught us using this expensive equipment as photography props? Kim would pose on all of the equipment and I even have one of her in a trash can. She was studying to be a nurse, but it strikes me that some field in which she was in front of a camera would have been more suited to her. Wonder if she stuck with being a nurse? Taking photographs and playing with computers are two of the passions that have stuck with me.

As I said, Kim was willing to “strike a pose” at a moments notice. She is leaving work for the day and she gave me a pose on the way out.

I am going to close off my “machine room pictures” with this final one. When I took this picture I didn’t have much of a clue about lighting. And I certainly didn’t understand backlighting and the need for a fill flash. When I got this picture back from the developer, I was not happy with the results. I couldn’t see her! I am somewhat surprised that I didn’t toss out the photo at the time. Now that I scanned it, I really like the picture. I think it is an excellent silhouette. Can you tell if she is looking at you or away from you? I like the artsyness of this photo very much. I need to give it a suitable title. Girl in black probably won’t be it.