A:CHKDSK Skip Pape – July
1989 Newsletter
President of Sarasota IBM-PCUG
Gary
has been after me to write an autobiography type article for some time. It's
difficult to write about yourself and make it interesting, but I'll give it a
try!
A
small town in Connecticut was where I lived until I went away to college. As a
youngster, I was always interested in radios and electricity, building many
one tube radios and amplifiers. When it came time to pick a college my
selection criteria was an electrical engineering curriculum that did not
require you to take a foreign language as I had difficulty passing those
courses in high school? Northeastern University in Boston met my search
parameters and being wartime I entered an accelerated program starting in May
1943. The night of my high school graduation I took a train home after class
that day, graduated, partied, and took a train back to Boston at 2:00 a.m. so
I could be in class the next day. In those days we went to class all year
having a free weekend between semesters that was spent in town drinking as
many ten-cent beers as we could afford.
When I
turned eighteen and the draft board began looking me up, I tried to enroll in
the Navy V5 Air Program. They found out I was colorblind and that left me the
single option of the infantry. During basic training several of us were given
calculus exams one afternoon. I must have passed them because they sent me to
the college program at the University of Connecticut just a week before basic
was over. A few weeks later, that basic outfit was sent over as replacements
at the Battle of the Bulge. When they broke the college unit up about a year
later we were all sent to the Signal Corps because we were Electrical
Engineering students. No one checked for color blindness and I ended up as a
telephone instructor.
After
the service, I finished my degree at Northeastern. The year was 1948 and
engineers could not get jobs. Some company called IBM did come looking for
people to service their calculators, I took their offer of $175 a month
and thought I would be fixing hand crank adding machines as I had not seen a
punched card at that time. I soon found the machines had hundreds of relays
and miles of wire. I still remember the instructor telling us that the
machines were just made up of many doorbell circuits and he'd be ashamed of
any one of us that could not fix a doorbell.
In
1950 the Electronic Age arrived and every one was looking for engineers. In
1951 I transferred to the IBM engineering lab in Endicott, NY. In those days
that one building in Endicott and a small new facility in Poughkeepsie was the
total IBM engineering force. I had many leading edge assignments. We were
developing a Type 650 (vacuum tubes) drum calculator and I did much of the
printer, tape drive, and disk storage attachment design. When we announced it
in July 1953, the market forecast was for 250 machines, we shipped over 2,000
and it was the first computer to reach a production rate of one a day.
We had
another tube machine ready when the edict came down that all future machines
must have transistors. We immediately went on two years of overtime developing
the transistorized 7070. I had design responsibility for the interrupt system,
which was the first one used on a commercial machine, later went over to
the design of the tape controller and
reader/printer controller. The first 7070 was shipped to Eastern Airlines in
Miami, and they sent me down in July to assist for a couple of weeks. It was
my first exposure to Florida; it
was so hot I said I would never return.
After
that I moved into management and had responsibility for IBM's first optical
scanner machine. Looking back it was sort of a Rube Goldberg, as it had a
high-precision rotating disk as an image dissector, but it worked and we
shipped over a hundred of them. Then they sent my family and I to England for
two years during the development of the System 370-Mod 135, I was the US
Engineering Manager when it went into production here in the states. That
covers about 33 years with IBM and I decided to retire at age 55. We had to
get out of the high-tax state of
New York, and lo and behold we fell in love with Florida. Maybe it is not as
hot here after you grow older.
When
the Apple II came out, I bought one of first ones and tried my hand at
programming. It was a new challenge as my experience was always hardware logic
design. After IBM came out with their PC, people began to kid me about my
Apple, so my wife talked me into buying one of the first PC-XT's. I converted
my finance program to BASIC and
expanded it. Now I have upgraded to a PS/2 Mod 30-286 and I'm still improving
my program, this time it's a stock program to keep
track of each stock by certificate number, calculating the new cost basis
after each split. Always fun and sure keeps me out of trouble.
As
I look back, I had some good assignments during the time computer technology
was in its infancy. In those days when I came home and wanted to talk about
computers no one cared, now they are a household word and we even have clubs
like ours throughout the country just to help users. As I look back, I'm sure
glad I took that job in 1948 servicing punched card accounting machines.
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