Leonardo By the Numbers and Other Computer Memories

Posted on December 2, 2002 in Childhood

To tell the truth, I feel for the Tech support staff at my site. There’s nothing quite as tragic and maddening as a total system crash. Dozens if not hundreds of settings need to be remembered and keyed in. Your customers fire up their cel phones and give you no end of grief.

Except for me. Mr. Nice Guy. You see, my father worked in computers when I was growing up — back in the days when the CPU occupied more floor space than my condo. I have more processing power in my PDA than Dad had on the second floor of Aerospace Corporation. Dad died in 1980, so he didn’t get to see the revolution, but he knew it was coming. I thought he was crazy when he told me that some day I’d have a computer in my home. Well, he was wrong about that. We have six (counting the PDA).

The lesson he labored hardest to impress on my was not to assume that computers were “smart”. “A computer is a an idiot,” he told me. “They are only as good as their programmer.” I remember him telling me how lousy most of the computer chess programs (written in Fortran and Algol) were. He could easily beat them. This was a good thirty years before Deep Thought.

Another thing which seemed cool at the time was a program a coworker wrote to churn out a copy of the Mona Lisa — all done by one of those IBM Selectric ball heads. It had no color capability — the reproduction was in black and white — and when you got close to it, you saw that it consisted of tens of thousands of numbers, strategically placed to grant the illusion of an image. The local newspaper heard about it and did a story about it. We looked back at Leonardo’s model (I like the theory that it is Leonardo in drag) through the panel and looked towards the future through the same image.

Creating the thing beat the life out of several ribbons. Then when the programmers had the printouts, they had to cut and paste the final product.

I remember Dad talking about tape drives and bringing home piles of IBM cards. “Never shuffle these” he warned me, gravely. That was how programming was done in those days. You wrote a line of code on a punch card. Then you played around with the order of the cards until you got the results you wanted, rewriting lines as necessary. Many forests died for the sake of NASA and SAC accuracy.

Until the invention of the semiconductor, you couldn’t see laptops and desktops. Walking through the computer lab was like walking through a laundromat except that they kept things ice cold. The tape drives pounded around like sideways mounted agitators for wash machines. Printers spat out reams of paper — indecipherable progress reports. There was no way anyone could fit all that stuff in a home and yet here I am today, pounding the keys.

And remembering those days before the micro-computer revolution, when Univacs spoke only to Univacs and IBMs only to IBMs and no one expected the parts to be interchangeable any more than you’d be able to use the caburetor for a Kenworth truck in a Volkswagen.