What did I learn outside school?

Last week I asked what did I learn in school, with an emphasis on how much I had forgotten of what I supposedly learned.  What I really learned in school was to learn.  I had teachers who excited me about a subject, and I had subjects that excited me even if the teacher didn’t.

I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have.  The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14.  My environment was rich with printed publications.

They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press.  They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of  its competitors.  They may have even subscribed to National Geographic.  I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time.  But we also had books.  I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals.  I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.

We also listened to the radio.  I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.”  We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music.  Was that WDOK?  I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower.  And of course, lots of pop music.

We had no TV then.  I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air.  To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store.  We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.

I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college.  I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon).  Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library.  With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number.  I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers.  Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others.  I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked.  On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program.  I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.

When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!

One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course.  We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose.  In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.

We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate.  As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.

Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired.  I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed.  Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group.  My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler.  I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions.  I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in.  We just jumped in and started solving problems.

Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else.  A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA.  Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.

I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned!  I’ve lost track of the software I learned.

Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software.  Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release.  I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.

With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!

Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.

How many seconds in a minute?

According to Apple, there are ten seconds in a minute!  Maybe even less.

Last week I downloaded and installed the latest Mavericks update on my Mac laptop.  Near the end of the lengthy process, it displayed “10 seconds left” for some part or another.  Twenty seconds later, the display was “10 seconds left” (or was it remaining?)  And again at thirty seconds on up to sixty seconds.  I don’t remember how soon after that time was displayed I started tracking the time, and I don’t remember how long after I had noted sixty seconds had passed before I stopped tracking.

But whatever, is this the lauded corporate “efficiency” that government supposedly lacks?  Whatever else is going on in the operating system that is inefficient.  I do know that Microsoft products have been getting slower to load.  I can almost go downstairs to pour a second cup of coffee while waiting for a spreadsheet to open.  This is even true of spreadsheets that don’t have a lot of data.

And of course, there are all the user complaints that seem to go on for years without resolution.

I do know from personal experience that not all problems are resolvable and that some take a long time to get enough data to solve.  In the sixties at Univac I was part of the small team that maintained the FORTRAN compiler.  We had a user report (number 498, I think) that we never solved.  Our main problem was trying to figure out what had happened on a computer we had no direct access to and not enough information to ask the right questions.  We never had another user report with the same problem.

On the other hand, I see complaints about the same problems year after year in the support communities for Apple and Microsoft.

What is the critical mass for these problems such that the big corporations will put enough resources into resolving these issues?

Here’s a radical idea!  For every unsolved problem a company has, the CEO should have his or her pay docked ten dollars per day.  Let’s be generous, and only count weekdays that are not holidays.  Would these problems go away sooner?

What about docking the CEOs pay for every day that false advertising is present.  Apple has made downloading Mavericks free to encourage people to move away from older operating systems.  Supposedly Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are free.  These are competitors to Microsoft’s Excel, Write, and Power Point.  These three Apple products are listed in a Top Ten Free downloads in the App Store.  However, if you place the cursor next to them, “$19.99” appears rather than “Free”.

Many users have complained about this for three months or more!  Is this another case of Adam Smith’s warning about trusting those who live by profit and have deceived and oppressed the public?

The learned wanted, learners need not apply

Back in the bad old days before the Internet was ubiquitous, I was the sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GENIE (General Electric Network for Information Exchange).  It had a very primitive typed command interface that many users had difficulty mastering.

One user either couldn't print or couldn't save a file from the Genealogy Roundtable.  My being in the Twin Cities and he being in Cleveland made it very difficult for me to know exactly what was on his screen.  I went to Cleveland for personal reasons and as a side trip, went to his house.  I forget what terms were on his screen, but he had a completely different idea what those terms meant than I did.  Once I explained them to him, he was able to do what he wanted.

During this same period, I wrote a genealogy program called Family Events.  One user complained that certain printed charts had lines that shouldn't be there.  I couldn't visualize or understand his problem because my printed charts looked OK.  It wasn't until we were both at the same genealogy conference that I understood the problem.  He was using a non-Apple printer and I was using an Apple printer.  As a shortcut I had given unneeded lines a negative length.  The Apple printer didn't print these lines; the non-Apple printer printed them as long extraneous lines.  I think once back home I recoded the problem in about an hour.

It's sort of like the urban legend of the kid who solves the problem of the truck jammed under a bridge: let some air out of the tires.

Once I wrote the above paragraph I thought of a related subject that I wanted to write about - the "shortage" of "high-tech" workers.  From this thought, I changed the title of this entry from "More on problem solving" to "The learned wanted, learners need not apply".  This "shortage" has been going on for decades.

The basic problem is that too many employers want somebody who can begin working on complex problems on day one.  Once those problems are solved, you may be replaced by someone who can begin working on the new problems on day one.

I've never had a job that I did not require some training after I was hired – from grocery clerk to bus driver to main-frame computer programmer.  My very first computer job I had to teach myself the basics of programming the company's computer.  For my nearly 20-year job with Univac it was constant change and new things to learn.  I didn't know FORTRAN, but I was set to finding and correcting errors in the compiler and its library.  In fact, our supervisor, John Macgowan, never did learn how to write a FORTRAN program, but he was a real whiz at finding and correcting errors in the compiler.  I won't bore you with the details, but it was nearly 20 years of constant learning and change.  I burned out when microcomputers came on the scene and I didn't feel like Univac was keeping up.  So, I started my own company and learned how to program several microcomputers without the benefit of special training.

What I didn't learn was how to run a business.  Then I learned that businesses don't want new employees who will learn.  That is, learners need not apply, we want the learned.

See "So-called high tech shortage".

1968 Letter from Europe

My mother-in-law kept many of our letters from Europe in a scrapbook.  After she died three years ago, my wife kept the scrapbooks.  This week she has been rereading our old letters.  She pointed out to me one I wrote from Basel 29/30 October 1968.

I was in Basel, Switzerland to prepare a demo for a potential Univac customer.  Univac didn't have one of its own computers in Europe yet, and so we borrowed or bought time on customer computers.  For this demo I was working with an 1108 at Sandoz in Basel.  Sandoz is now called Novartis.

I don't remember much of the trip except I was introduced to raclettes, cheese melted on a board in front of a fire.  The German I was working with took me to a restaurant near the bahnhof that specialized in raclettes.  I've had and have made raclettes since then, but none have compared to those at that Swiss restaurant.

And I don't remember if we made the sale for which we did the demo.


Letter to my in-laws, Jean and Fred Smith, 29/30 October 1968

Dear Folks,

I am back in Basel on a four week assignment and back to learning German, but tomorrow or Thursday I go back to Rome for the rest of the year, I hope.  Not quite, we hope to take a two week ski vacation at Christmas time, but in Switzerland.  I tried calling three hotels in Davos yesterday, and found out you have to make your reservations in the spring or in January when you leave, so we will probably spend this year in Italy.

All this travel is not as exciting as it may seem.  As I generally work nights and have to see people during the day it often becomes an eat-sleep-work cycle.  Right now I am writing this while waiting to get on the machine [a Univac 1108 computer].  Hah, just as I finished the last sentence, the machine became free.  Now I am baby-sitting the machine at the console.

The most interesting and frustrating experience of being in Europe is the language problem.  My minimal French, German and Italian gets me throughout quite a variety of situations, but general conversation is a rare and difficult thing.  The missing ingredients are vocabulary and listening ability.  I really think that in the U. S. not enough emphasis is put on foreign language ability and they are are treated as an academic subject.  Throughout most of the world to much importance is given to grammar and not enough to vocabulary.  I always cringe when a grammar author boasts that he only introduces 20 words per lesson.  I have found, especially in Italian, that one can use a grammarian's nightmare of a sentence but still convey the thought if one has sufficient words.  Conversely with a bit of vocabulary and little grammar one can at least get the sense of newspaper stories.  To me the best method would be to have classes using conversation and reading newspapers and magazines.  Tests would be on the things read just as they might be in English lit or History.  (Most Europeans who graduate from high school can speak 2 foreign languages, of course not all finish, but still.)

Sincerely,
Mel