jwg | Entries tagged with mit

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.

Yesterday was National Armed Forces Day.

The closest I ever came to being a member of the Armed Forces was freshman year at MIT where taking ROTC was a requirement. We marched in uniform on Briggs Field or in the Armory. We had classes in military history and learned how to clean M1 rifles. I got to shoot an M1 once.

In my sophomore year I heard that you could get excused for flat feet so I went to the MIT infirmary. They said I didn't have flat feet, but my eyesight which required glasses would get me excused so I filled out a form and that was it.

When I was a MIT student I lived in a dorm, Baker House, that served food only on weekdays. So for weekends we went out a lot. This June for MIT reunion week there was an open house in Baker House to commenorate its 75th anniversary and I went there. I saw each of the 3 rooms I lived in. The place hadn't changed much. Room furniture was the same - perhaps replicas.

Saturday lunch was usually Durgin Park - recently closed. If you got there early enough the line was short. I usually got a big burger. The water pitchers were collosal - you could hardly lift them. And the waitpersons were habitually rude.

Saturday or Sunday evenings it was sometimes Simiones - a nearby Italian restuarant - that was distinguished by their shouting out the order numbers when they were ready.

Jack and Marions in Brookline was a great place - and they closed at 3am so it was good for late-night snacks. They had a Sjyscraper Special - $3 - which was a collosal sandwich and if you ate the whole thing you got your name on the wall. My name was there.

Ken's at Copley menu was similar to Jack and Marions - but you didn't get your name on the wall and it was hard to park there so we dodn't go much.

The English Room at 29 Newbury Street was good. And they set their prices so that when you added the meals tax no pennies were needed to pay the bill.

For late night snacks there was a trip to Elsie's in Harvard Square which had great roast beef sandwiches. Usually one or two people made the trip there and brought back a few sandwiches.

Just up Memorial Drive from the dorm there was the Smith House, and a bit further a Howard Johnson. We rearely went there.

Every year for the past few years there has been a MIT Class of '60 Mini-reunion: lunch and a speaker. This year the speaker was Robert Dimmick, who is an Etiquetteer. He gave an amusing talk about the evolution of the Dinner Party from Queen Victoria to the Kennedy Administration - proper dress, appropriate food and serving procedures, etc. (I jokingly commented to him and the organizer afterwards that we should have invited the staff of the restaurant to this so when we have next year's event it would be more elegant. It was at the Glass House restaurant in Kendall Square.)

This brought up some memories of my childhood. When my parents had dinner parties we used special dinnerware, fancier silver cutlery, we had a live-in cook and a chambermaid-waitress who wore fancier uniforms than the usual ones and we dressed up. Many apartments in NYC had a small suite of maid's rooms behind the kitchen - ours had two small rooms and a bathroom. I still have some of the plates which we use when we have guests for dinner.

Near the end there was a drawing for a door prize and I won. This year it was a delightlful beaver (the MIT mascot of course). Last year I also won the door prize which was a very interesting book by Charles Sullivan of the Cambridge Historical Commission and another author titled Building Old Cambridge. Sullivan was the speaker for that lunch.

The beaver has joined our family. He told us his name which is Barton. He was named after William Barton Rogers, the founder of MIT.

I am not a veteran.

At MIT ROTC was compulsory for freshman and sophomores. This icon is me in my uniform.

We marched with M1 rifles, I think we fired them once or twice; we listened to military history lectures; learned how to clean an M1; learned how to polish the brass.

This morning there was an interesting Boston Globe Article about the closing of a the Metropolitan Warehouse near MIT.

Over 50 years ago a friend took the following photograph:

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.

(A long post with information about a very important period of my life and career)

On May 28 and 28th I attended a 2-day conference at MIT to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Project Mac - the second afternoon of which was a Multics Reunion.

Project MAC (Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was an interdepartmental project at MIT with lots of ARPA funding. It has transmogrified into MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and sits in the Stata building - a Frank Gehry masterpiece.

One of the key projects in Project MAC was Multics (Multiplexed Computer and Information Service). It started as a joint project with MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric and eventually became a Honeywell product. It was a many-user multiple access "time-sharing" system with an emphasis on security, 24-7 operation, ease of use, segmentation and virtual memory, and had a number of very new design ideas for the time. Many of the innovations have since appeared in other products as people who worked on Multics joined/started other companies and/or were users of it.

In 1967 I left Honeywell where I had spent the beginning years of my career as a Fortran Compiler writer and joined GE to work on this project. My last assignment in Honeywell had been in a Systems Planning organization looking at new Operating System possibilities and new ways to write software and was very frustrated at the difficulty getting them to think ahead. They sent me to an Industrial Liaison Symposium at MIT which was about Multics. Several months later I was working for GE on Multics .

GE was the hardware vendor who planned on making a commercial product out of this. In 1965 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference there was a set of papers presented describing this system. By 1966 the project had started design and development. Bell Labs dropped out in 1969 (the people working on Multics at Bell labs went on to invent Unix (castrated Multics - a joke name).

The GE people and the MIT people were working together, but not very well. My boss at GE, Charlie Clingen, got promoted to be the lab manager for our organization (Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory - CISL) and I got promoted to be manger of the development unit. We started working on getting people in the two organizations to work together. Several years later I became overall (lower level) project manager of the joint project and continued to work- on merging the people in the two organizations (on separate floors in the same building in Tech Square). Sometimes project members did not know which organization their peers worked for. In 1970 Honeywell bought the GE Computer business and committed to making Multics a product. We hired some of the MIT people and went on to make 12 major releases to a number of prestigious customers. It was a great model of a University Research/Industry joint project with effective technology transfer.

After the product was capped in 1985 and CISL closed in 1986 - wotj product maintenance and enhancement handled by our counterpart group in Phoenix and a University if Calgary spinoff company that had done some of the develop,emit in the later years. Some of my team moved to the local Honeywell office and worked with other people on a project, called Opus, to create a new OS for the existing mini-computer system. Opus was cancelled in 1988 - mostly because the growing popularity of PCs was killing the mini-computer business. Some of us also had an attempt for a spin-off to produce secure systems but that didn't pan out and besides Bull - the new owner of the Honeywell computer business wouldn't give up the technology rights - it took a long time for them to agree to release the source code.

The first day and a half of the conference had a number of presentations from Project Mac veterans, some current researchers, and university people from Cornell and Georgia Tech on new educational/research ideas. Some of the presentations described the origins of Project MAC, particularly those projects which are big deals today - either in industry or in the research arena. It was very interesting to attend and it was good to get back in touch with what is going in this industry and research lab that I worked in for 30+ years.

The Multics reunion was on the second afternoon and we had a presentation from the key MIT professor on this project and it's predecessor: Corby (Fernando Corbató) and several other presentations. It ended with a panel session that I chaired; the panelists were Corby, Jerry Saltzer - MIT professors with key roles in the project (and that is an understatement), Bob Freiburghouse - a compiler genius who was a colleague of mine at Multics and previously at Honeywell), and Peter Neumann who was the Bell Labs leader. The Panel session had short talks by each of us and then lots of Q&A which continued after the session was officially over.

There were lots of opportunities to reminisce with many people who I worked with in the past and even before that. I got to talk to Doug MacIlroy - one of the Bell Labs guys who produced a compiler for Multics when the contractor GE had chosen failed, and who was my M-11 (Calculus) instructor in my freshman year at MIT (1956)! I talked to Joel Moses, one of the MIT professors at Project MAC who had nothing to do with Multics but he and I were students at Columbia in 1961 when we both took an introductory computer programming course - which to me was the catalyst that launched my career.

It is interesting to note that this project was conceived in 1964, first ran as a service at MIT in 1969, became a product in 1974, ran in mission-critical applications at a number of big customers - with a total of about 70 systems (5-10 million dollars per system) and whose last system was shutdown in 2000. It was used as a Software Factory in Bull and Honeywell for other products. There is a huge amount of information about the system on the Multicians Web site including the one formal paper I wrote. The source code is on an MIT web site and there are several people working on emulators. And lots of the ideas were adapted by other companies for their products.

The people who worked on it were a great set of people and many of us remain in touch in various ways these days. One of those people is my husband.

With all the recent focus on guns I was thinking about my own experiences with guns.

When I first went to summer camp at the age of 10 one of the activities was riflery where we shot at targets on a range with .22s. What I remember is all the focus on safety and the consequences of misuse of the rifle. And at the next summer camp I went to after I outgrew this one we also had riflery. Again, focus on safety and consequences. Three years I ago I went to a reunion at the first camp and went to the rifle range since we had camp activities (I did work crew, swimming, archery, riflery, and canoing that weekend). Safety and consequences of misuse were stressed - at archery too.

My parents had a summer house in upstate New York with lots of land. For some reason my father brought home a BRNO (Czechoslovakian company) .22 rifle from a business he was financially advising (a NYC Canal St cutlery and lots of other stuff store) and we occasionally shot at targets or tin cans. Once when a friend was visiting we took turns shooting up in a tree. In the course of this a bird fell out of the tree. We were shocked that we had killed something and put the gun away immediately. I don't think I ever shot it again.

After my mother sold the house I had this rifle in my closet for many years and at some time a long time ago I called the Cambridge Police to ask them to take it away and an officer came. As I recall he was surprised I was just giving it away.

At MIT I was in ROTC for a year (it was compulsory in those days - that's where the above icon is from). We marched around with M1s on our shoulders and had classes in their use. I don't think we ever shot them. We also had classes in military history and I learned useful skills such as how to polish brass buttons. Somehow I still remember the Major talking about Von Clausewitz, a Prussian military theorist. The hardest thing about ROTC was the early morning classes where they turned out the lights to show a movie and I struggled to not fall asleep. Fortunately I discovered it was easy to get out of ROTC for medical reasons. I went to the MIT health services in the beginning of my sophomore year and said I had flat feet. The doctor said I didn't but since I was nearsighted that would work.