1971 -- My First Contact

 

My first contact with a computer was in 1971 at Camp Lejeune, N.C. I was on the general's staff in the CEO's office (Communication Electronics Officer) for the Second Marine Division. One of my duties was as the Division Frequency Coordinator. We had over 4,600 frequencies assigned to the division. The man before me controlled them with a 3-ring binder. Each page had the frequencies typed down the left side and each sheet was inside a plastic protector. Permanent assignments were typed in to the right and others, assigned for specific operation and only used for a short time period, had a grease pencil notation to the right.

The old control system, without a computer, worked like this. The Comm Chief of Second Marines, calls me and asks for a range safety frequency for two days. I pull out my logbook, find a VHF freq with no other assignments nearby, and tell him, "Okay, use kilo one seven." That code was an unclassified reference number so that I could talk to someone on the phone and give them a freq. He says okay, and I make a notation in the logbook with my grease pencil. Two days later he calls and says he's done with it so I open the logbook, (HIGH TECH HERE, pay attention and let me know if you can't follow the technical details) I pull out a Kleenex, spit on it, and erase the entry -- I'm done.
One of my first jobs was to automate that procedure and bring it up the level of available technology.

We had big coding sheets about 18" x 14" with 80 columns on them. There were, I think, either 30 or 45 lines to the page. Each line of 80 boxes represented one punch card and each card represented one frequency. For each of the 4,600 or so freqs I had to write a separate card and, if there was no assignment, I'd just put in the code, the freq, and the type. For an assignment I'd put in an abbreviation such as, 2/2 TAC LOG, which meant the tactical logistics net for Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment. Each morning I'd take ten or fifteen coding sheets to the Data Processing Center. In the afternoon I'd return and pick up my cards and a printout of the data. Note, nothing was actually going into the computer. They were just punching cards, feeding them into a card reader, and getting a printout.

When you got your cards the data that was encoded was printed across the top of the card. Something would occasionally happen to the ribbon and you'd get a card with punched holes but nothing printed and it became important to be able to read the holes. Actually, if you worked with the cards very long you could read the punches quite easily.
The DP center was a long low building about thirty by a hundred feet. In those days (and even into the early 90s) all computer centers were in buildings with ENORMOUS A/C units and raised floors. The purpose of that was that all the cables ran under the floor and, by pulling up a floor tile, you could crawl under the floor to work on the cables. (Something that happened frequently.) You entered the building at one end and there was a counter across the front. On the counter was an in-box. Any work you had you dropped in there and you went away. They didn't want to talk to you.

My problem was that everything I did was classified. All the freqs were CONFIDENTIAL and, when we were preparing for any kind of deployment, the frequency assignments were SECRET. There was no guard anywhere, just the unlocked front door, the in-box, and a bunch of guys behind the counter. At that time, I had just returned from embassy duty and security was in my blood. I always thought about the idea that anyone could walk in, paw through the in-box, and pull out some SECRET material. If he was stopped, all he had to say was something like, "Oh, I made a mistake on this input. I have to make some changes." That always did bother me. (An exception was TOP SECRET. If you had any TS you'd stand there and wave the bright red folder until someone came over and took it from you. Naturally there was a chain of custody on TS and ... I hoped and prayed that the clerks had a TS clearance.)

Behind the counter were five or six card punch machines, each with an operator typing away madly. Behind them was the computer equipment. Down the left and right walls were a number of tape drives. Each drive unit was close to six feet tall, three feet wide, and about two feet deep. Mounted on the top front were two reels containing magnetic tape, about one inch wide. Each reel had about the same storage capacity as a modern CD ROM. These are the things you see in "old" movies. The tape spins, stops, spins, reverses, stops, etc. In those days there were no hard drives and all data was stored on tape. The internal memory was reserved for operational programs and any calculations being made.
Across the back of the room was the control panel. Hundreds of lights, switches, patch panels, along with three workstations.

Each workstation had a console with a screen about nine inches square and a keyboard in front of it. Down the middle of the room was a double row of big boxes. Each unit was about three feet square and four feet high. Those boxes constituted the CPU (Central Processing Unit). Consider, inside your home PC is a chip about 1-1/2 inches square and no thicker than 1/16." That chip is your CPU and, I'm guessing, has more computing power than four or five of those old time computers. Our system was an IBM 360/40; state of the art at that time.

So, I pick up my cards and printout, go back to the office and proof it. The next morning I take back any corrections as well as the next ten or fifteen sheets. You can only turn in work in the morning and pick it up in the afternoon. Also, the more sheets you give them, the more errors they'll make; that's why we held it down to 10 or 15 sheets each time. As a result of all this modernization, it took nearly a month for me to get a correct printout of all our frequencies and their assignments.

Here, then, is the first reason I hate computers. With the advent of the wonders of computers it works like this. Top calls, I pull out my printout, find and give him K17. I make a note on the printout, then go find the card for that freq. I make a note on the card and write up a coding sheet with the information on it. Because it's after ten I can't take it to DP today. The next morning I take it to DP, wait for the afternoon pickup, and then have an updated printout.

The following day Top calls, says he's done with it, I make a notation on the printout, mark up the card, prepare a coding sheet, and the following morning I take it to DP, that afternoon I pick it up and ... darn! The clerk keyed in the wrong freq. I make a notation on my printout about the error, prepare a coding sheet and the following morning I take the correction back to DP, wait for the afternoon, pick them up, and we're up to date.
Naturally the coding sheets and cards, because they linked frequencies, codes, and assignments, were all classified. That meant they had to be stored in our classified files center and, when I was done with them, I had to make sure they made it into the burn bag.

My boss demanded that our printout be constantly updated. Just my making a pencil notation on it was not enough for him, we had to have a CLEAN printout all the time that showed all the assignments. He was amazed at how we could now track all of our frequency assignments by computer. Never once did he realize that it now took me two or three days to get that CLEAN printout when, in the old days, it took, oh, maybe ten seconds to make or erase entries! Amazing how easy your life is with computers, huh?

1972 -- My Next Experience

My next reason for hating computers is the very next assignment I had. From Camp Lejeune I went to Iwakuni, Japan. I was in group comm for Marine Aircraft Group 12. The Marine Corps was in a transition to try and get computers to do all our work so, in their infinite wisdom, SOMEBODY decided that Max should learn embarkation procedures. I got a two week trip to Okinawa to attend embarkation school and, upon my return I was appointed as the Squadron Embarkation NCO.

In the old days we'd pack a bunch of boxes, keeping track of what went into each one, put them on a pallet, weigh it, and we'd be ready to go to war. Keeping track of what went in was nothing more than standing there with a notepad and writing down equipment and serial numbers.

Compare that with the speed and convenience that computers offered us. First, I had to code all the equipment in the squadron. Every single piece of equipment had to have a separate punch card showing its name, type, serial number, volume, and weight. Equipment was packed into boxes and each box had a serial number so each box had to have its own card showing its serial number, volume, and empty weight. Most of the boxes were stacked on pallets. Each pallet had a serial number so each one had to have a card showing its empty weight and volume in cubic feet. Realistically, in a combat load, we would never put all our radios on one pallet, but for convenience in explaining this, let's pretend that we're going to put six radios in a box, then put twelve such boxes on a pallet. First I had to find the individual cards for each of the radios, then group them together in the boxes into which they're going to be packed. Only then was I ready to sequence my cards.

First, I laid down a unit ID card, then a group card (the group card tells the computer that everything that follows is grouped together), then a pallet card, then a group card, then a box card, then the six radio cards, then an end card (meaning the six radios are being packed in that particular box), then a group card, box card, radios ..... until I had all the boxes packed and stacked on the pallet, then a final end card. For those 72 radios, I would end up putting together 112 cards in a precise order.

To give you an idea of the scope of my task, consider that, to mount out the entire squadron, we needed around two hundred pallets, each with anywhere from four to twelve boxes, each box containing as few as two or as many as forty items. Then we had twelve 2-1/2 ton trucks into which we crammed fifteen or twenty boxes; twelve jeeps with two or three boxes each; ten maintenance vans, each containing literally hundreds of pieces of equipment; and six CONEX boxes. These were metal shipping containers, eight feet on each side and, inside them were, again, literally hundreds of pieces of equipment. You have no idea how many hours (make that more like days) I spent shuffling around cards and building groupings. My desk looked like I was playing the biggest game of solitaire in history.

After the card deck was sequenced I sent it to DP, had them input the data, and give me a printout. Guaranteed there's going to be a mistake somewhere and I'm going to have to correct it and get a new printout. NOW I'm ready to pack the stuff in the boxes, pile the boxes on the pallets, and band them up. Wow, how did we ever manage to accomplish anything before we had computers?

[In a bit of cruel irony just a month after I completed the cards and had the printout ready, our unit was sent back to Vietnam. None of the senior people trusted computers so can you guess how we packed our gear? Yep, we packed the boxes and someone stood there with a tablet writing down the serial number of each piece of equipment. My card deck was never used!]

1978 -- Computers in Combat

In 1977 I was in Comm Co, Headquarters Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, in Okinawa. Our most modern piece of equipment was the AN/TTC-38, a telephone central office manufactured by Sylvania that was supposed to automate our field telephone system. Our biggest problem was getting it running. There was an 8-level paper tape for the main program that was something like fifty feet long. Before you could load that in, you had to boot the system. Across the top of the control console were 32 little switches. Using a reference manual you set them in a sequence of on and off.

Remember your basic computerese. Switch on = 1, switch off = 0; each one or zero is a bit; eight bits make a byte; each byte represents a letter, number, or character. So, each time we set the 32 switches to various positions of on and off and then pushed ENTER we were entering 32 bits of data; four bytes; or four characters. We had to set those stupid switches SIXTEEN times before the system even knew it was a computer. The headache here was that if even one switch was set wrong the system didn't tell you, it just took everything and then refused to start. You just had to set all of them and try it. If it didn't work, you had to go back and start all over. After the system booted, we had to feed in the fifty-foot paper tape that gave it the operating instructions so it could function. Only after that could we feed in the two- or three-hundred foot paper tape that contained all the user data.

If we wanted to add a user during operation there was no direct input to the computer. We sat at a console, typed in the data, and it punched a paper tape. Each customer required about three feet of tape. Then, to get that data into the system we had to pause the system; that meant that anyone picking up their phone didn't get any dial tone, but any calls in progress were not interrupted. It only took about five seconds to feed in the tape, but the new user wasn't in until the system did a restart. It would wait until there were no calls in progress and then restart automatically, which took only a couple minutes. Now you have the long tape and maybe eight or ten of these short ones. If the system crashed and you had to do a reboot: you did the switches, the fifty foot tape, the long tape, then each of the short ones. Whew! When we reached this point we'd have the system punch a new tape with all the customer data, and throw away all the little pieces. By this time the user tape is four hundred feet long and there is no spool for it. We have to wind it on our fingers. Ain't it wonderful how computers make our life easier?

Final Hatred

 

My lasting problem has to do with the software. In the early days of PCs when you bought a computer all you got was a dumb machine. If there was a hard drive DOS was probably (but not always) loaded on it, but nothing else. Anything you wanted, you went out, bought, and loaded it in yourself. When you turned it on it was up and running in less than thirty seconds. Any time you opened a new program, ten to fifteen seconds was all the time that was needed.

Today, no matter what you want to do with your computer, you get five thousand other programs that eat up memory and slow things down. Even with monstrously fast clock speeds, it now takes five to ten minutes for the computer to be up and running. When you open a new program it can still take a couple minutes for it to be ready to go. Even with all the advances in Windows, I still find there are things that it can't do and I revert to my DOS days and do it from the command prompt.
So, that was my world without and with computers. Maybe you can now understand why I hate the stupid things.

Into The Minefield

In those days programmers carefully flow-charted every little nuance of the code, erasing rectangles and diamonds, and re-routing flow lines until they were satisfied or exhausted, and then, after brushing off the eraser flakes, they would start a whole new battle with the coding sheet. After laboriously coding a fairly simple program, we had to get it keypunched, and when boxes of cards were dumped on our desk we had to check that the keypunchers had exactly transcribed our gibberish code into holes in the punched cards. All this took time and reinforced our perception that we were working in a minefield and had to tread carefully.

It seems strange now, but in those days we had no idea of how to design a program. We knew code, and individual instructions, and we wrote them down, and coaxed them through the many steps required to get them into the guts of the computer. We wrote spaghetti code that you wouldn't believe today. We tortured the computer and it tortured us back, and after many weeks or months we had something that worked most of the time and was marginally useful. And all this hard work reinforced our belief that computers were very difficult to master.

A single test took days. After flowcharting, coding, and checking keypunch cards we had to wait for an audience with the computer. We guarded our boxes of cards jealously. A dropped box of cards meant hours of sorting. We had to prepare JCL for a compile run first, and then our programs were offered to the clattering card reader in the manner of a human sacrifice. If it didn't chew up the cards, the mainframe would usually print out compile errors, and we'd have to go back to the source code. When we finally got a clean compile we were ready for a real test on a real computer.

The Dinosaur

The early machines are difficult to visualize today, but I worked on one, years ago, and have never forgotten. It was a LEO, only used for odd jobs. It was old even then, living in its own building, which looked like a holiday chalet. In fact, it filled the building. Trainee programmers filed through the door into the belly of the beast. We shuffled forward, single file, between ceiling-high banks of flashing vacuum tubes, clutching small decks of punched cards. In was like being in an amusement arcade on a hot summer day. We waited for our turn, sweating. A vacuum tube went "pop", and a bored operator unscrewed it. Our programs took a few minutes each to run, and were, I think, supposed to print our names and addresses on a dusty printer in the corner. Mostly, nothing happened, but the guy in front of me put his deck in the card reader and about a minute later the console lights froze. The head operator let out a howl of rage. “They've done it again,” he said to no one in particular. “We'll have to shut it down and re-IPL. No more tests today!” We all left the building.

Into The Future

As time went by, of course, the software got better, and the methodology got better, and we learnt top-down coding, and how to incorporate standard routines, and the kids coming up behind us began to treat computers like cars, to be souped up and tinkered with, and kicked a little when they didn't perform, and eventually we got the message.

Still, in the early days, the hardware didn't help us at all. When online processing via the CRT became available, we all began to pump out more code.

Coming to the States meant a quantum leap from the old way of thinking to the new for me. In Britain in 1968, the computer was still a scientific marvel to be treated with awe. Americans had already gotten over their sense of wonder. I learnt that the computer was a machine to be used, just like a car, or a TV, or a washing machine. Programmers tended to grab the computer by the throat and force it to do their will. Pretty soon, I was doing the same, and producing much more.

She's Not Intimidated

Today, mainframes and PCs chatter to each other constantly, and new methodologies and procedures and hardware have transformed computers and the way we use them beyond recognition. We make them do things that were impossible a few years ago. I watch my granddaughter, who has just learnt to read as she bangs away at her word processor. Soon she'll be hitting the chat rooms, and zipping around the world on the Internet.

She's not awed. She handles her computer the way I'd handle a book. One day, she, or the kid at the next desk will come up with an idea that will revolutionize the way we use computers. It will seem so simple to them. They grew up with the computer. Their minds were transformed by it. Computers, for me, were monsters to be tamed. To my granddaughter, they're cute little puppies. She'll make them do tricks I could never imagine.