3 Aug
2020
3 Aug
'20
6:55 p.m.
Students living near MH had a bit of a leg up, having access to the
Explorers (did that include any young women?). Offspring of employees,
particularly executive level employees, seemed to appear quite often. Adam
Buchsbaum and Rich Cox and Terry Crowley come to mind. But, as the names I
remembered demonstrate, they were exceptionally bright, and often became
(valued) regular employees. I share Heinz's recollection about trying to
keep them busy. Terry Crowley joined us as a summer student, and we gave
him the "summer project" of making some improvements (like eliminating the
512-byte record size limit) to /bin/sort. He came back in under a week and
asked "What's next?" -- jpl
On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 1:15 AM Heinz Lycklama <heinz(a)osta.com> wrote:
On 8/2/2020 12:05 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
I wasn't claiming to be authoritative on who
got to be summer students;
it was
just my observation based on who I ran into. I
do remember some other
kids in
there but not sure how it happened or what became
of them; Heinz may
know. My
first summer a group of underprivileged kids from
Newark was brought in.
It mainly sticks in my mind because one of them was terrified because the
computer was so much smarter than he was, so someone (Hal Alles?) tasked
him
with programming a PDP-11/10 via the front panel
switches which gave him
a
completely different perspective.
Jon,
this brings back memories of working with summer students and
Explorer Scout high schools students (like yourself) during my years
at Bell Labs in MH. I have to credit Carl Christensen for bringing me
in to work with him in helping making computers and training resources
available to Explorer Scouts on Monday evenings shortly after I started
at Bell Labs in 1969. I enjoyed this time in helping and motivating the
students as well as taking them on hiking and spelunking trips in NY.
I had one summer student work for me on the LSX projects. He was so
brilliant that I had a challenge to keep him busy with the tasks I gave
him because he finished them so quickly. One of the motivations
for doing LSX was actually providing a platform for the music synthesizer
that Hal Alles was building.
If I can remember any other names for you I will let you know, but
this was more than 45 years ago ...
Heinz