A Very Special Sunday

I remember the day quite well, my then VERY pregnant wife was due any day and I worked at ACS up the Hill (in Palo Alto it's called The Hill) at ACS as a Customer Engineer for IBM Corporation, the year was 1968, the month was August and the day was the 2nd. Today 41 years ago in San Jose, California. Place of birth though was
Mountain View, CA about 20 miles north of where we lived in Campbell a suburb of San Jose. I had left for work about 7:15 as was my custom, work was scheduled on the systems and subsystems of the IBM Computer that was installed at ACS and I was one of a team of CE's that performed routine maintenance on the computer installation.
In these days there were no cellphones, only pagers about the size of a paperback book that buzzed you when calls came in from sites with machine problems that needed attention or from managers with instructions and questions. I was in the CE room at ACS looking ovcer the chalkboard of maintenance items that needed done that day during the Preventative Maintenance that was scheduled by the sites Senior CE. My pager went off, I jerked and reached for the phone to call the IBM office in Palo Alto. "Your wife just called Mr. Lute", the dispatcher said and added, "she says she thinks she's going into labor". With that I hung up and headed out the door to my car to race home to take her to the hospital in Mountain View which I got to pass on my was to get her! Upon arrival she was as calm as a swan on a summer pond, unflappable, I stood there in wonder as she gathered a book to read, a small address book and other things she thought necessary for this momentous occassion. Then I raced her in our 1961, 7 year old VW bug to the hospital to pace my shoes off and hold her hand thru the largess of the labor. Then into another room where I stood by and watched the birth of my only son and got to hold him only moments after he was born (We had two daughters in following years). Today is his 41st birthday. Happy B-Day Michael, and the very best to you and yours on this most remembered of days. Thanks for the thrill Red, your red hair was quite a sight, I was so very proud then and still am!

Computer Chatter

I dunno if anyone cares but my whole working life was a curious mix of the computer industry, IBM (yes), a small company in Long Island, NY called Potter Instrument Company and my last one Control Data Corporation. I worked in an IBM plant in San Jose, CA right out of the USAF and during this time wound up getting trained as a field engineer working in San Francisco and environs. Not just a job believe me, thoroughly entertaining and at times impossible. The City (As SF is known locally and elsewhere) was a bustling place full of people, cars, buses, noise, dirt and panhandlers. I was a young man with a starter family who lived in Stinson Beach about 25 miles away along the northern coast. I loved it there. We moved there shortly after my son Michael was born, from Campbell near San Jose in the fall of 1968. It was a small (660 sq. ft!) ex-tent house from early in the 20th century. Built on a platform flat on the sand. It became a house at some time in the past with 4 tiny rooms and thin walls coverred with lath and plaster. The outside was lap siding which we painted grey with white trim, our elephant look. It remained cool and wet most every day and suited both my mood and need for refuge from the chaos of the Streets of San Francisco sans Karl Malden from the TV show of the same name.
___
The computers that challenged my patience and intellect at that time were room-fillers to be sure, huge 7 foot tall black boxes that roared with the sound of fans and gears. Complex beyond belief and prone to both errors and outright failure at any time. One spent a goodly portion of each working day in study of the modes of failure and in acts called Preventative Maintenance aka PM designed to stem the flow of Incident Reports aka IRs to the main office. My friend SC worked at the same location that I did in downtown SF, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company aka PT&T and we grew to be best friends and co-workers. Days were spent cleaning filters, vacuuming the frames and checking voltages of the 360/50 and 360/65 processors and thier related periferals. Huge racks of reference books in dark blue matching covers lined the edges of the equally huge main room. It was always cold therein, these things needed airconditioning just to stay powered up as they had extensive heat sensors to detect overtemperature conditions in each section of the machine.
Humans came in second in this multi-million dollar computer facility thus we froze except when we roasted.
More to come...