I grew up in Denville, a little town in northern New Jersey. I had a friend whose father knew someone who worked at what was then called EMSI, Esso Mathematics and Systems Inc., housed in a big complex on Park Ave. in Florham Park, NJ. I don’t think I even was interviewed, but I ended up with a job there the summer after graduating from the local public high school in 1968!
EMSI was a service company, one of over 100 companies in the Standard Oil of NJ group of companies. The purpose of the company was to apply advanced math and computer techniques to make the various Esso companies work better. The company had a large computer center on-site, a large room full of card keypunch machines, and extensive offices.
There was a strict division of work by sex. There were secretaries, all women. The men, all dressed in white shirts and ties, were the math and software design people. Software design was done using graph paper and plastic sheets that had flowchart cut-outs in it, so you could make uniform branch triangles, etc. Here’s a picture of what it looked like (not mine, I never had or used one):
The programming was all done by women, who wrote lines of code onto coding paper, with lines and columns that matched up with Hollerith cards. This was supposed to be a mechanical affair, driven by the graphical designs. Of course it was more than that. When a sheet was ready, it would be sent for keypunching, all done by women using keypunch machines. I think we used the newer IBM 026 machines. The programmers, all women, would get the cards and sort them in a rigid box for storing and transporting to the machine room, where male machine operators would stack them into card readers for loading into the computer. Often there were errors, of course, so the machine would print the error listing on wide, 132 column paper using a mechanical printer. The paper had a string of square holes along each side that fit into gears in the printer. The printers were “line printers,” printing a single line of characters and numbers on the paper. Once the line was printed, the gears would advance the paper one line, and the next one would be printed. The pages were all joined end-to-end, fed to the printer from a big box sitting beneath it. When a print job was complete, the last page would be advanced out. An operator would tear the print jobs apart from each other and put them on a table for people to pick up, along with any related cards to the programmer. The printout could be a list of error messages from the compiler, maybe along with a printout of the program itself. You could ask for the assembler language version of the program to be printed along with the original source code in FORTRAN, which was important when debugging. If the program compiled properly, i.e., had no syntax errors, it would be run. It would either run to completion and print out the desired results, or it would crash, in which case a listing would be printed including a memory dump, which was a hexadecimal listing of the contents of the memory at and around the cause of the crash. I spent many totally absorbed hours poring over and deciphering memory dumps.
The physical embodiment of a program was an ordered set of cards. You would carry the cards for a program around in a cardboard box, all lined up in a neat stack. The box was as wide and high as a card, and at least a foot long, long enough to carry 2,000 cards. Every once in a while someone carrying a box of cards would stumble and drop the box, scattering the cards on the floor. A fun time would then ensue, figuring out the right order of the cards and putting them back. This is one of the reasons that the last handful of columns in many card decks contained the sequential number of the card in the program, or set of data, or whatever; without such numbers, putting the deck back together would take even longer. I dropped a deck once. It’s the kind of thing that, once you did it, you took great care never to do again, quite apart from the people around you in the hallway laughing at you.
I don’t know how it happened, but I was the exception – a tall, skinny, male high school grad who was bright but entirely without qualifications. Everyone seemed amused by my existence. Perhaps that’s why I got away with things. It’s probably also why I kept getting asked to do things that cut through the otherwise strict divisions of labor. For example, I skipped the usual two-step of getting programs written, the design part by tie-wearing men using plastic guides to make neat-looking diagrams of program operation and flow, followed by women “translating” the design into actual lines of code. What a waste of time, I thought. Just work out what you wanted to do in your head, and then write the code. Before long I skipped the write-the-code-on-paper part, and just typed it into a vacant keypunch machine in the sea of lady keypunchers.
Looking back on the experience, I realize how lucky I was, and how unusual the experience I had working for a large division of a giant company. I now know that there must have been projects with goals and timelines that had to be met. People were judged based on whether they hit the pre-determined goals. While I was stuck into that environment, I was there as an un-planned-for extra resource who fit into none of the pre-defined categories. People threw me bits of work to keep me busy, without ever telling me how and when it had to be done. Each task involved something I had to learn, often a lot I had to learn, so I just tore into it. When I was done, I presented it to the person who gave me the work, much like a dog who dashed off to fetch a ball someone had thrown, perhaps into a lake. I imagine I looked as eager and pleased with myself as a dog, ready to dash after another ball. I never focused on the learning; I just drove towards the ball, overcoming obstacles (mostly things I didn’t know, sometimes the strict hierarchies and divisions of labor) as quickly as I could along the way. It was a formative experience, and one that was at odds with the normal group working experience. I knew I was lucky to have the job, and my appreciation for how lucky I was has grown over the years.
This is an edited excerpt from the draft of my Computer-related Memoir.
Invaluable, to remind people what "ancient history" was like. You should also comment on how "big corporations"--like GE, GM, IBM--lost their dominance and shrank or died because of the ingrained behavior of "corporate" America.
Posted by: Arthur Petrou | 08/11/2020 at 08:33 AM