jwg

Today is Memorial day, Of course I am young enough to remember when it was called Decoration Day.

You have to give a lot of credit to those who did military service in the many wars we have been in and sadly too many lost their lives. My personal experience was a year of so in Army ROTC at MIT. When I went there it was required for freshmen and sophomores to take ROTC - since MIT was a land-grant univesity. Classes included military history and learning about weapons. I did learn how to clean an M1 rifle and got to fire one once at the MIT rifle range. We had to dress properly and make sure our shoes were shined and the brass buttons were clean and shiny.



Sometime in my sophomore year I heard that you get excused if you had flat feet. So I went to the MIT infirmary but the doctor said I didn't have flat feet, but my eyesight which required glasses would get me my deferment. When I left grad school in 1962 and got a real job I had to worry about being drafted and this was Vietnam war days. The company I went to work for, Honeywell Computers, was considered a critical industry I got a deferment.

Both my grandfathers were too old for WW I. My father was too young for WW I and perhaps too old for WW II, but since he ran a food import/export business he would have been deferred. And it was convenient during rationing that he was able to bring meat home. Once I said - oh, no - steak again! And I certainly remember blackouts as a kid - and worrying about finding bomb shelters.

Today when walking around I passed the small local cemetary, Wesleyan Cemetary, and there were quite a few flags scattered about.

In early spring of 1962 I had decided to leave grad school and get a job in the computer industry having taken several computer programming courses and had a part-time job at MIT in the computer center. And along with that I decided I would get a new car to replace my then-current used car - I don't remember what it was - probably about a 1956 something or other - Ford perhaps.

My choice was an MG-A; a flashy sports car and I checked out a nearby dealer.

I went on a job interview at Honeywell and got a verbal offer at the interview. The job was to write a code generator for a Fortran Compiler. On the way home I stopped off at a bank to get a loan application (I was going to secure it with some stock).

A few days later I got the offer in the mail. I called up the new boss and negotiated a start date in early June when the MIT term was over. (I had a camp councillor summer job they wouldn't let me wait until the end of the summer to start since the project was just getting started.) And then I went to the car dealer to purchase the car.

Below is not a picture of my car, but it looked like this. I really liked it. One of the downsides of the car was that it had a tiny trunk and very little space behind the seats so it wasn't very practical. Also the convertable top attachment to the windshield leaked a bit in heavy rain. The one speeding tiicket I got I am sure was because I was a youth driving a red sports car - I wasn't going any faster than other cars. It had a bit of engine trouble (the engine ran on for about a half minute when you shut it off); after a couple of years that required too many trips to be fixed so I traded it in for a red MG-B. The MG-B had more room in the trunk and behind the seats so it was more practical, and the top didn't leak. But it wasn't as cool looking.

I lived in an aparment in Belmont, Mass. One of my two roommates had a red Austin-Healy Sprite, and the other had a red Triumph TR-3. So we had quite a backyard where we parked our cars.

My 60th High School Reunions are coming up - on next Saturday, and the other the following Friday. Why 2? I went to Dalton School in NYC for 1st through 8th grades and at that time it was only co-ed through 8th grade; the high school was girls only. Now it is co-ed all the way. So then I went to Fieldston - now called Fieldston Ethical School for 9th through 12th grades - called Form III through Form VI. These were two excellent progressive private schools - and still are excellent. I loved them both - the facilities, the courses, the teachers, the many activities.

I'm looking forward to seeing the buildings - now quite different - and some of my classmates.

I did go to my 50th reunions - see here and enjoyed them both. After graduating from Fieldston I went to MIT and after that I was a PhD candidate in Physics at Columbia. In my first year at Columbia I had a part-time job teaching 7th and 8th grade science in Dalton.

At the end of that year I decided I didn't want to be a Mathematician, a Physicist, or a teacher. My father in one of his one-sentence pieces of advice said: You should take a computer progamming course. This was in 1961. You had to worry about the draft in those days and scholastic deferments were nice to have. I returned to Columbia with a mixed bag of courses and a few weeks into the programming course I knew what I wanted to do for my career. For the Spring term I came back to Cambridge, took several more courses at MIT as a Special Student while thinking of applying. Instead I found a job at Honeywell who was in the computer business then starting in the summer and that launched my career.

Another one of my father's one-sentence pieces of advice was when in my junior year of high school I was wondering about where to apply to colleges he said: Oh, you are going to MIT.

For various reasons lately I've thought about my career. So here is a quick summary post.

After graduating from MIT (Math) in 1960, I was a Physics PhD candidate at Columbia. That first year I also had a part-time job teaching 7th and 8th grade science. At the end of the year I decided I didn't want to be a mathematician, a physicist, or a teacher. You had to worry about the draft so I thought I try one more year at grad school while figuring out what to do. My father expressed one of his one-sentence brillant suggestions: "you should take a computer programming course". Another one was when I was wondering about where to apply to college he said: "You are going to MIT".

A few weeks into that course it became clear what I wanted to do. I moved back to Cambridge took a few classes at MIT as a Special Student while contemplating admission and had a part-time computer job. And in the spring I applied for jobs. You could get a draft deferment working for a critical industry which inluded computer companies.

My first interview was at Honeywell - to work on a Fortran Compiler project. I got a verbal offer at the interview and on the way home and stopped at a bank for a loan application so I could buy a new car. A few days later I got the written offer. I accepted it negotiated the start date and then went the dealer to purchase a brand new MG-A.

I wrote the code generator for that compiler and then became project leader for another compiler project. When that was done I joined the Systems Planning department - which was frustrating because they weren't very receptive to new ideas. They sent me and a colleague to an MIT symposium about Multics - a new operating system project that was a joint MIT, Bell Labs, and GE (the hardware vendor) project.

Several months later in early 1967 I (and my colleague) were new employees at GE. The GE office was in Tech Square - a remote office to the division in Phoenix. It was called the Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory (CISL).

I worked at CISL as a programmer, then development manager and eventually CISL manager. Bell labs dropped out early in the process (the Multics people on the project became the people who invented Unix). GE sold its computer business to Honeywell and Multics became a serious product. -multiuser with emphasis on security. It ran on an expensive mainframe (5-10 million dollars, a huge machine room - and not as powerful as my phone). We had very prestigious customers: Ford, General Motors, the Pentagon, NSA , the US Geologic Survey, Several Canadian government agencies (we were strong on dual language support - a Candian requirement), and a bunch of French agencies and universities (Bull, the French computer company had been affiliated with GE and then Honeywell for years).

In 1985 it was decided to "cap" Multics and CISLwas shutdown in 1986. A bunch of my team moved to Honeywell offices in Billerica to work in a new project (with some of the other people there) which we called Opus using Multics technogy to be a new OS on one of the Honeywell small computers; I was the manager. The computer industry was changing and Bull bought controlling interest in the Honeywell computer business and Opus was cancelled. Some of my team stayed, there was a reorgination and layoff and I inherited a couple of other departments.

A new highup VP decided he wanted to form a high-level group called Corporate Software Technology to work on advancing a bunch of things so as to improve productivity and product quality. I was recruited by him and became Mission Manager of Software Renovation - this was looking at tools and technology to help enhance existing products. It was interesting, and frustrating - I worked with people in Billerica, Phoenix, Italy, and France - and scored a trip to Japan since NEC was a partner.

One of my colleagues in Corporate Software Technology was named the manager of an Applied Research group and I joined it. Our main project was working with a research group at University of Illinois and another one at Columbia to build a prototype software Inspection system called Scrutiny. We demoed it a various conferences, wrote a paper with several of my peers to present at the European Software Engineering Conference in 1993. We got a DARPA grant to do more work on this and there were thoughts about making it a product. But with many changes in the industry and upper Bull management decide to scrap our work. In 1994, another layoff came up and I volunteered.

I formed a one-man consulting company - JWG Software Systems. Bull was one of my clients and worked with my old group a bit. Then I branched into working on a number of patent infringement law suits (defense and offense). At my own choice this tapered off until I stopped doing it (it was a nice transition - worked 4 days a week, 3 days, 2, 1, and then 0).

The last Multics system was shutdown in 1992. There is still an active Multics cult; people who worked on Multics are called Multicians. We have a Multicians web site. It took a while, but some of us eventually got Bull to release the source code (and system tapes) and they are stored at MIT. Last year at the 50th Anniversary of MIT's Project MAC there was a Multics session and I chaired a panel session.

Several years ago a couple of people started writing an emulator of the hardware and the system now runs. There is lots of discussion on the email list and it is fun to hear from some old-time colleagues. Some more work is needed and there are various thoughts about a possible future.

The Supreme Court just issued a unanimous decision disallowing the patenting of human genes. It's about time; the idea of patenting something discovered in nature is so ridiculous.

For a few years in the recent past I was a consultant on a number of patent suits - both defense and offense. The patents were mostly computer software (my area of expertise) and a few hardware. In the course of this work I read over 1,000 patents and studied 100-200 of them in detail. In my opinion most of these patents should never have been issued because they weren't original ideas or they were obvious.

One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism. That is pretty hard to check.

My understanding is that the patent examiners have very little time to review each application. And believe me it takes a lot of time because you have to relate the claims (the statements of what is being patented) to the often poorly-written design description which is needed to clarify what the claims actually mean. And then there is reference documentation and cited patents that are similar (but cited to show that this invention is something new) which should be checked and finally there is knowledge about the "state-of-the art" which is needed to judge whether the invention is actually new.

And then if a patent is issued and the holder sues for infringement a lot of sleuthing has to be done to defend the suit. I remember one patent that I worked on whose holder sued two companies for infringement. I thought the idea was clever but not really original and the patent shouldn't have been issued. The patent holder hadn't succeeded in making his own product.

Both cases were in Discovery Mode and thus I was given the source code and technical documentation of both products - there was a lot of it; if printed each wold have been ~1,000 pages or more.

It was interesting to note that one of the products was written in C and it was very messy code because the product had to be able to run on Macs, Windows, a DEC OS, a Novell OS and Unix and thus had to deal with machine and OS differences when compiled. How they ever got that mess to work is a good question. The other product was mostly written in Java which made it and was much easier to understand and I'd suspect was a more reliable product; it's design documentation was much clearer too.

I wrote some tools to examine the source code to look for potentially infringing code and think I found all the right stuff. I wrote up my findings, and went over it multiple times with the attorney. One case was going to go to trial and I didn't want to participate since it would have meant traveling to Chicago several times and hanging around with little to do; so I declined to do more work. My understanding was that neither case actually went to court (this is what usually happens), but there was some form of settlement. Both companies that were suing were bought by larger companies and I don't know what happened to the products.

If that patent hadn't been issued I and the attorneys wouldn't have earned any money; other than that nothing else in the world would be different. Patenting things that shouldn't be patented and then dealing with the subsequent law suits is a big industry that keep lots of people employed. There are people/companies who buy patents and then sue for infringement - they are called Patent Trolls. It is estimated that patent trolling in the US resulted in 29 billion dollars of costs in 2011.

In Zippy this morning someone was fired and given a pink slip. He asked "You couldn't have made it a blue or maybe a brown slip?"

rsc wondered if anyone ever gives pink slips to fire people these days. In my career I "officially fired" a very small number of people and there were no pink slips involved.

This reminds me the time that I had noticed we had some kind of disciplinary form in the supply room. I had a fish tank in my office and one day I got tired of the angel fish who kept eating other fish so I removed it from the tank and let it die. Then I filled out one of the discipline slips and pinned it with the dead fish to my bulletin board. Did everyone in the office behave better because of this example? No, it just confirmed their view that I was a bit weird.

At some point last night when not being able to fall asleep again I was thinking of the 1960-1962 period of my life. My mind went through this history:

I was a new PhD candidate in Physics at Columbia in the fall of 1960 and had a part time job teaching 7th and 8th grade science at a private school. At the end of the academic year I had pretty much decided that I didn't want a career as a teacher, didn't want to be a physicist, and living in NYC wasn't where I wanted to be. But I had no alternatives and there was the problem of the draft and that 2-S deferment was pretty nice. So after working as a summer camp councillor I returned to Columbia but not teaching in the fall of 1961 and took math instead of physics courses with the eye of applying to MIT in the Math department (my undergraduate degree).

I also took a computer programming course at the fledgeling Columbia computer center. Was that fun. I became a hacker instantaneously spending lots of time there and the soul of a new machine hit me (IBM 1620).

I moved back to Cambridge for the spring term (1962), entered MIT as a Special student while preparing to apply and got a part-time job at the MIT computer center. (This reminds me that I still have the card deck of a Fortran program I wrote that was an English to PigLatin translator). Quite soon I decided to get a job in the computer industry which would get me a critical-industry 2-A draft deferment. I applied for a job at Honeywell writing a Fortran compiler and got a verbal offer at the interview. On the way home I stopped at the West Newton Savings Bank to get a loan application so I could buy a new MG-A that I had recently seen. When I got the offer letter in the mail I applied for the loan and bought the car a few days later.

I started the job in June. After a week of so of basic training I dug in - the project was just starting - there were a bunch of new hires plus some experienced people and I was given the responsibility of designing the code generator. This project is what launched my career.

During the summer I was temporarily living in Baker House, the MIT dorm I had lived in as an undergrad because one of my prospective roommates was on the summer staff there. By the end of the summer my two roommates and I were to move into a newly found apartment in Belmont. I had my red MG-A, RKL had a red Austin-Healy Sprite that he had won in a limerick contest!, and DWD had a red Triumph (TR6) so it was quite a nice backyard. In July my father died so I went back home (upstate New York) to see my mother and go to the funeral. My father's death occurred while playing duplicate bridge (6 diamonds redoubled I am told!). My parents best friends came immediately to help out and my mother dealt with it pretty well; my father had a heart condition so it wasn't a complete surprise. My mother had excess household goods since they used to have 2 abodes (just like we do now) so there was stuff to bring back. Some things like one of my iron frying pans is from there and may well be vintage 1940!

And eventually I did fall asleep again.

Back in the bad old days the only method of inputting anything new into a computer was via punched cards. The IBM 026 Key Punch machine was the way to do it. They rented for $50 a month (this was before the IBM antitrust suit whose result was that IBM had to sell as well as rent equipment). The machine was actually slightly programmable - there was a drum with a specially prepared punched card on it that could specify things such as that certain columns had numbers only or have the equivalent of tabs. Most programming languages had column specific meanings such as column 7 being the start of an actual statement in Fortran and columns 72-80 were for sequence numbers.

( Getting an extra Key Punch machine )

( How you printed listings )

In 1962 after escaping New York City and aborting my quest for a PhD in Physics I returned to Cambridge to be a special student at MIT and had a part-time job in the MIT computer center. I decided to apply for a real job and got one at Honeywell (then in Wellesley, MA) to join a project that was building a Fortran Compiler. This job came with a draft deferment and I thought it was pretty good to get such a job with just a couple of computer courses and a three month part-time job.

Honeywell's marketing strength was in commercial data processing so we were not a mainstream project. My whole career with the exception of a horrendous 6 months was with non-mainstream projects. This helped knit together the team because we had to stick together. At one point a few months into the project we were called into a meeting, I noticed that Hugh, a nice brilliant older fellow that was part of the project wasn't there. It turned out he had died during the night. This was quite a shock to all of us and helped knit our project together a bit more.

( a little geekery and some politics, and reflections on the state of software development  )

We completed the first release in about 1 1/2 years. Actually I remember that management was so anxious to get it out on-time that we released a version that we knew wouldn't work and assumed that in the several weeks it would take to actually get it to customers we would have the fixes done (we did). Then as soon as we released these bug fixes we had to do documentation. So I and others drew flow charts (the theory is that these had already been done as part of the design) and wrote narrative descriptions. Then these were sent out to be professionally drawn and typeset. Five months later I got back the finished copy of this documentation. By then it was obsolete because we had made lots of changes. I asked about submitting documentation changes and was told that we couldn't do it because it was too expensive to produce. Of course no-one read the documentation because we were the maintainers and the field support people who were one of the intended audiences had no need for it anyway.