The First Time

The First Time

The first computer I ever saw was at Vanderbilt University in 1961, while on a high school field trip. I was much more interested in the fact that the building next door was the gymnasium where the Vandy basketball team practiced. The thought of seeing one of my heroes in the flesh, generated much more excitement than hearing about the monster computer blinking stupidly at me and the other 30 wide-eyed high school teenagers.

So, I don't remember much about the computer except that it was very big and very gray. It had lots of tiny flashing lights in its “Control Center,” and it lived in a room about the size of the lot my house sits on today. The lights were all the same color and arranged in tidy boring rows on the rectangular panel at the Control Center, which was merely a fold-down desktop with an office chair in front of it. There were about a hundred switches on the control panel – also in straight perfect rows. The chair was vacant. I wondered who was “controlling” the giant machine.

There were no transistors in it. The whole thing used vacuum tubes (thousands of them), arranged in neat rows like the lights on the Control Panel. The operators opened one of the hundreds of dull gray cabinets to let us stare at the little tubes. They were called “peanut” tubes, owing to their size, but they reminded me of white Christmas lights that were a little too dim, and too tidy.

The little tubes had to be replaced on a fairly regular basis, and several technicians were on duty 24 hours a day to keep it running. I thought it was somehow strange to have these men serving this machine, especially since the machine didn’t seem to be doing anything but making the lights blink on the control panel, and using lots of electricity to light the Christmas lights that were hidden away in the gray cabinets.

Since then I have met many machines. An IBM 1401 with a disk drive about as tall as I am (over six feet), a 7094 which lived in the basement (actually three floors below ground) of the math building at Purdue University, a Microdata machine about the size of a refrigerator with a 20 MB hard drive which looked like a matching dishwasher, and hundreds of PCs and laptops.

The machines all seemed to have what I hesitate to call a “personality.” Looking back, I realize now that I began to associate each machine with a person I knew at the time. I don't remember much about the machines, but I can recall quite a bit about the people.

The first 1401 I encountered, for example, brings to mind a young naval officer I knew at the time. He liked to putter around and tinker with things. You've met people like Carl, I'm sure. He would spend hours fiddling with something on the computer, when it could have been worked out in 10 minutes with a pencil and paper. Carl once wrote a program to print out the disk and track where the seek head was located at any given second. There was no use for it, but he wrote it, anyway. He was just tinkering. Carl eventually went to work for Burroughs – a good match, I thought.

The first 7094 I saw, a basically solid machine which never seemed to complete anything, reminds me of my roommate at college. Marvin (I went to college when roommates were always the same sex) was an intelligent, healthy, apparently competent person. He was about six feet tall – slightly taller than the 7094. He wore brown horn-rimmed glasses, white dress shirts, and jeans, complementing his “computer geek” image. The word geek had not yet been invented, but Marvin was truly a geek.

Marvin never took on anything that offered the possibility of reaching a conclusion. His mission in life seemed to be to work a problem to death without solving it. Marvin worked well with the 7094 because it seldom completed a program but always gave him several pages of reasons why not. Marvin was in the Navy and is probably retired by now. The 7094 is retired, too.

I met my first Microdata Reality machine in 1975. The Microdata always seemed like a pleasant friendly machine to me. Though it had its unique quirks, it was user-friendly, accommodating, and just plain fun – like the young woman I met at the printer while we were waiting for our output one day.

She had long, shiny, dark brown hair and a pleasant smile.

I stuck my thumbs in my belt, sidled up to her and said, "Yuh come here often, ma’am?" I used my best Texican accent.

"Unfortunately, yes,” she smiled.

“What’s yer name?”

“Melody,” she said, offering her hand.

“I’m Steve. Yuh wanna fool around?" Us Texicans get right to the point.

"Uhh – No?” but she was still smiling and her dancing brown eyes said maybe.

Her voice had the sort of husky quality of certain actresses and women who do the nightly news. It reminded me of Lindsay Wagner, the woman who did several Ford TV commercials.

Our conversations grew longer and we grew closer as the days passed. We talked computers, family, and life. We shared a chocolate milkshake, watched a sunset or two, and yes, we fooled around.

Eventually, I moved out of state and then to Australia, and I lost touch with her. Her face merged with other pretty faces, but her memory still tugs at me when I see an old Microdata machine. There have been other machines and women since then, but I guess I will always remember that gentle, friendly Microdata and Melody. There's just something special about your first time.