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I have lived in Cambridge in my house since 1966 + 4 years in Baker House while a student at MIT in 1956-1960. From 1967-1986 I worked in a ~40 person Cambridge office of a computer company working on Multics, a very advanced computer sysem for the times – for the last several years I was the manager.

I have been involved as a volunteer in many organizations – often as a board member, and sometime as treasurer. Most of them are Cambridge oriented and have worked to make the city a better place. It has been interesting and fun as well. Some of them are LGBTQ oriented. As an out-gay person I have had the pleasure of helping make life better for LGBTQ people.

Partly because we are moving out of Cambridge to Brooksby Village, a retirement Community in Peabody Mass, and because I had enough of this I am no longer doing any of this.

Cambridge Political organizations

Cambridge Civic Association – CCA
CCA was formed in 1945 as part of the effort to change the city government to the current strong City Manager, system. It characterized itself as a good-government organization and focused on working with City Councilors, the Mayor, and other parts of the city government, It also endorsed a slate of candidates and helped support the election. I joined in the ‘70s and stayed until it ended in the late ‘80s. I was a board member and the treasurer for most of the time.

Cambridge Lavender Alliance – CLA
CLA was formed in the ‘70s and as a LGBTQ organization and worked to make the public and the government deal with issues faced by LGBTQ people. It endorsed a slate of candidates for school committee and Council. Some of us worked with other people in the city and helped form the LGBTQ+ Commission. I was a board member and treasurer. After the Commission formed it ended.

Cambridge City Government organizations

Cambridge LGBTQ+ Commission
I have been part of this organization since it was formed in 2004 and been co-chair most of the time – retired in April 2022. Commissioners are appointed by the City Manager. We work with organizations in the government – particularly police and health care and have worked with housing and healthcare organizations in the city to help them improve policies and practices with respect to LGBTQ people.

Technical Advisory Committee to the Election Commission
This group was formed to help the Election Commission switch from the time consuming hand count of Council and School Committee preferential ballots to electronic. The hand count took about a week and it was fun to hang around and chat with people who were observing, it. We studied other systems and made a recommendation which was accepted and implemented.

Library 21 Committee
This committee was formed when the City Council rejected a bad plan to extend the main library that messed up the park next to the library among other issues. The committee had city government employees, volunteers, and outside library experts to figure out the program of the expanded library. It was very interesting – we did a lot of research – among other things looking at other library expansions - I as well as some others did a lot of this and visited other libraries when I was traveling and went to a library conference. The plan was well received and got the OK.

Library Design Advisory Committee
This was formed to work with the architects on the details of the design. Again an example of city employees, resident volunteers and library experts working together. The resulting library expansion is wonderful and has been well received.

Silver Ribbon Commission
This was formed by the city to investigate various issues of aging in place and produced a good report. Unfortunately little was done about its recommendations. Another example of resident volunteers working with city employees.

Envision Cambridge – Mobility Group
Envison Cambridge was a set of working groups that looked at possible futures for the city. The Mobility subgroup was dealing with transportation and just getting around. I was a member of this. Most of the recommendations were ignored.

Miscellaneous

Cambridge Postal Advisory Committee
We met with the Cambridge Post Office management a few times a year to look at policies and practices and make recommendations for improvement. We got a prize from the US Postal Service one year for our work. It lasted for a few years but after several changes in the local Postmaster it died out.

In the winter of 1986 Robert rsc and I went to Spain. Landed in Malaga and went to Córdova, Grenada, Seville, and Ronda. Ronda is this gorgeous town situatied on the edge of a cliff.

We went to the British Virgin Islands in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994. This was to Guana Island a lovely resort that we first found in 1983 and went to in 1985. Then we continued to go 2 our of every three years - our last visit there was this year. It is a small place with at most ~30 guests (lots of repeats), a bit of a wildlife sacntuary, good food, nice snorkelling, etc.

In 1987 I went to Japan. This was a business trip. My job title at the time: Mission Manager - Software Renovation as a member of the Corporate Staff (Honeywell) and I was meeting with some of the Software Process people in NEC - there were close tie-ins between companies. It was a 2 day meeting, my boss and his boss, the VP of engineering flewover the day before, and left right after the meeting. I, of course, stayed another 10 days and spent more time in Tokyo, and went to Takayama, and Kyoto.

I see stamps entering Paris in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992. These were all business trips to meet with people in Bull, the Honeywell affiliate and eventual owner of the Honeywell computer business. I always took a few days extra to be a tourist.

There are several Canada stamps in 1987, 1988, 1991 and 1995. While on the Multics project we had an affiliate with a spinoff from the University of Calgary, and I took a few trips to Calgary. One of those trips followed one of the Paris trips and I flew directly from Frankfurt to Calgary for that meeting. I think there were more trips to Canada than those.
I think the 1995 one was to a Software Engineering Conference in Toronto (I remember going to the SkyDome, not to see the Blue Jays play but because there were tech booths placed in it.)

1990 has another trip to Japan, this time a vacation trip with Robert. We spent time in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Kurashki.

In 1992 we took our winter vacation to Greece - a bit of Athens but mostly on Crete.

In 1993 while I was a member of the US Applied Research Lab of Honeywell/Bull I had a business trip to Milan and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany). I presented a paper at the European Software Engineering conference on Scrutiny, a Collaborative Software Inspection system. The Milan part was to go to the European Computer Support for Cooperative Work conference and then Garmish-Partenkirchen was ESEC. Then I went to Munich, met Robert and we enjoyed a bit of Octoberfest and then went off to tour Bavaria and visit King Ludwig's castles.

In 1995 it was off to Stockholm for the next European Computer Support for Cooperative Work conference. And then flew to Oslo, met Robert, and we went to Bergen to take the Hurtigruten up the coast to Kirkenes (very close to the Russian border. There was a ceremony when we crossed the Arctic Circle.

I went to see the replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall - it is currently in Gloucester.

In addition to the names of the >58,000 people who died in this awful situation, they had a time-line of events - brought back lot of memories. Just staring at the list of names brought tears to my eyes.

I could have been there. In 1961 I had a draft deferment because I was a Physics PhD student but was considering dropping out and would have lost my deferment. (Fortunately my father suggested; take a computer programming course - I did, was fascinated by it and got a job as a computer programmer in 1962 that got me a critical industry draft deferment.)

In 1967 when working for GE on the Multics project, one of my office mates was Van Binh Nguyen. He had moved to France from Vietnam and was sent to work on the project because Bull, the French computer company that I eventually worked for, was a participant. I remember his saying that when he went to school, Ho Chi Minh was a student in that school!

PS, this icon is me in my ROTC uniform at MIT.

Thinking about the Robin Williams suicide reminds me of this: I was sitting in my office ~early 1970s interviewing a prospective job applicant when Myra, the group secretary, came in to my office and said "John I need to talk to you". I excused myself and she told me that Peter Haber, an employee in the office had been discovered to have committed suicide. I was shocked - he had been my office mate, worked for me for a while, and a friend. He used to come over to my house to play the recorder while I played harpsichord. I knew he was a little troubled about his career direction, but other than that I'd had no clue. It was quite weird retuning to my office and finishing up the interview. (I hired the applicant).

Another office situation was George Pillsbury. He was a tech writer. He had been manager of the tech writers but my boss demoted him because he just want' up to the job. He remained a relatively competent tech writer. He was a troubled alcoholic - sometimes under control and I don;t recall him coming into the office drunk. Then one day he didn't show up at work and we soon learned that he had shot himself.

And then there was, I think, Jan - a friend of a friend, who stayed on my couch for a few weeks. She was a severe manic / depressive (I know they don't use that terminology anymore). I'd never encountered anyone quite like that - she was almost always at one extreme of the other. It was very hard to relate to her; I tried, but. She found another place to live and moved out - to my relief. And then several months later I heard that she had committed suicide.

After these events I always think about what could I have done that might have avoided this.

(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.

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.

I finally moved my VCR (which we never use since we have 2 TiVos) to near my iMac to which it is connected via my preHD EyeTV device. I am currently converting a video tape of a lecture about the history of Multics that I gave to the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM in November of 1989. In a stroke of luck, I went to my miscellaneous paper archives and found a printout of the slides which is convenient because you can't see them in the video. I guess I'll scan them; it is remotely possible that I have the source on a possibly dead computer that may be in the basement but probably not and I'm not going to look now.

I've been paying attention to parts of it and I'll watch the whole thing carefully at some point and select a few of the best parts to publish somewhere. I think there would be some people interested in it.

I'm not sure what I'll do with it when I'm done; It's already an hour and I'm on slide 23 of 32! There is a Multics history project that is not really active these days. On top of this I have another such video tape of some other lectures (shorter and to the point) that were used when we started another project.