[Shop-talk] Quick question on garage floors and garage lifts

[Mullen, Tim]

Ahh, the memories...

I still miss my VAX, VMS, and FORTRAN.

I was the company FORTRAN Guru, I ended up helping all the other
engineers figure out what was wrong with their programs.

I too started keypunching (IBM 026) cards that were fed into a CDC that
the school used.  My senior year, they got some new fangled "time share
terminals" but I never had time to learn them.

First job was developing Finite Element Stress Analysis software, again
using keypunch and a remote job entry system to a Univac computer
located about a 1,000 miles away.

Next job actually had hardcopy terminals that I could actually enter
programs directly into the computer!

Later, we finally got a VAX down the hall.  A couple of us came in one
weekend and strung cables from the terminal room to our desks so we
could move the terminals to our office.  Management was astounded!  How
dare we not walk down the hall 10 times a day to check our printouts!!
Imagine the problems that would be created by having a terminal taking
up all our desk space!!

Good times.

I finally threw away my last deck of cards (some FORTRAN utility
subroutines I had developed) since I figured out that there wasn't
anything around to read the cards with any more and nobody was
interested in them as antiques.

I do still have my slide rule however!

Tim Mullen