1 Comment.

Dear ^z,

I was googling the other day (for "the best is ever the enemy of the good") and came across the following note on this page of yours [1]:

FORTRAN — Likely his first serious coding came in the summer of '69 at SMU during an NSF math enrichment session. Free computer time was a delightful distraction from the theorems of linear algebra, probability, and number theory; the refrigerated machine room and steel-gray card punch machines fit the monastic environs. ^z burnt processor cycles on a CDC mainframe doing, among other frivolities, Monte Carlo computations of pi to a few decimal places.

Hey, I arrived at SMU for my freshman year in September 1970. We had a DEC PDP-10 and a UNIVAC-1108 then, and I think they'd both been there for at least a year. But way back in the back there was a wonderful CDC-1604. On the day I arrived, about a week b4 classes started, I got taken to that room and pretty much never left it since. (Although I subsequently became a "10 freak" and spent the next 12 years of my life following the latest models of DEC-10's around the country). They didn't tell me there was an assembler, I really thought the only way to program it was in binary through the panel switches. I thought the mnemonics in the manual were just to make reading it easier. I cognited that it would be cool to write a program to interpret mnemonics from punch cards, and wow, with some effort it could even handle labels and then you wouldn't have to recode all your addresses when you added a few instructions in the middle of a program! THEN they told me about the assembler. I wrote a Simpson's rule integrator in binary and keyed it in b4 they told me that.

Anyway, I'm wondering if that was the CDC mainframe u were referring to. Is there anyone else in the world who remembers (and possibly fondly so) that machine? I didn't think it had a Fortran compiler, but then, I didn't think it had an assembler! Perhaps there was another CDC machine before the -10 and 1108, I don't recall. I know two years later the -10 and 1108 were taken away (by mean 'ol Sam Wylie) and we got a CDC 7600 or was it an 8600, something like that. And a bunch of staff, grad students, and students like myself all left in anger to go elswhere, and some Purdue guys led by Denis Frailey took over. Not important now.

What I am really looking for is someone who remembers that back computer room and the 1604. That was my first machine, the loss of my virginity, etc. Do you remember it? I will never forget it. 4K words of real cores! 48 bit words at that! Wow! Did you know any of the people, in particular, Bill "wimpy" English, the high school kid who ran it? How about Roy (Neil) Ferguson, Steve Glanville, Claude Overstreet, Mike O'Hagin, Hal Stout, Bill Wagers, Cliff Heming, John Hemphill, et al.?

Just checking for some nostalgia. Any thoughts?

Sincerely,

Steve Bush
http://www.steve.bush.org

PS: The most interesting, kind of cosmic, phenomenon, relating to my finding your site while searching for "The best is ever the enemy of the good", is that the first time I was told that was a moment key to my life, and it happened just down the hall from the 1604. I can't remember if it was Cliff Heming or John Hemphill, but one of them told me that if I kept striving for the kind of perfection I was striving for I'd never get anything actually done! To this day I remember that moment, as its a constant characterization of my life. A year ago, while reading a biography of Charles Babbage, the author used the phrase "The best is ever the enemy of the good" (Voltaire), which I had never heard before, but instantly realized it applied perfectly to my life and that original moment back at SMU, around 1972. Different words were used then, and now these new words seems so poetically to say the same, so important, thing.

Well, that's probably more than u want to waste time reading just now, so if you haven't hit the delete key yet, I thank you for listening, and feel free to hit it now!

Steve.</div>