9 Aug
2022
9 Aug
'22
8:58 p.m.
LOL
I joined IBM Research in Yorktown in 1978. I was an electrical engineer
and one of the first problems I was given was modeling a novel concept for
an X-Y touch panel. I realized that the model is basically solving
Laplace's equation in the plane. I was not a programmer at the time, so I
asked what was the recommended thing for that. I was told APL, so I
grabbed a manual and got to work.
Within a day or two I had a nice solver working and was getting useful
results.
(Of course, solving Laplace in the plane by relaxation is the slowest
possible way to get to the answer, but I didn't know much about numerical
methods back in those days.)
The next week I got a visit from the same IT weenies who had bothered you.
They told me that in my first week on the job I had managed to be the
biggest consumer of CPU cycles on the 370/168 and that I had to learn to
program in PL/I because compiled was better than interpreted. It took me
several weeks to get it working, since PL/I was such a pain in the neck and
I had to learn all sorts of stuff about how numbers were represented in the
hardware.
Obviously my time was worth less than the computer's.
Bleh.
=====
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On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 4:43 PM Charles H Sauer (he/him) <
sauer(a)technologists.com> wrote:
Early on in my career at IBM Yorktown, ca. 1976, I was
submitting many
long running simulation jobs to the 360/91 there. At one point, the head
of computer systems (I.T. if you will) wrote to the head of computer
sciences (my department) complaining that I had just spent $50K over
some short period, asking if this was justified. My management shrugged
it off, encouraged me to continue what I was doing. I might still have
the letter somewhere.
A couple of years later, while on the faculty at U.T. Austin, one of the
main budgetary items in research grant proposals was purchase of
mini-computers, assuming those were a more efficient use of funds than
paying for time at the campus computing center (then using CDC 6600 and
successors).
COFF?
Charlie
On 8/9/2022 3:19 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
Computing budgets were tiny: You had only so many
$$$ for your runs and
if you made
too many, you'd run out of $$$ before you were done (more applicable as
a student than
as a professional post school though). Consequently your time was
plentiful and
computer time was scarce.
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