Grace Hopper - Nanoseconds (Video Demo By Grace Hopper

LOL, I knew what EBCDIC was, I just hadn’t heard it referenced in a long time!

My first exposure to computers was in 1978 when Detroit Diesel Alison/Rolls Royce sent a civilian on our deployment with us, and they retrofitted our planes (A-7E Corsairs) with wiring harnesses hooked up to various sensors and transducers to collect data during flight to see if they could predict when an engine might fail...before it actually failed. Not a bad thing to try on single engine planes flying over water out of range of land.

They had a Digital PDP-11 they brought aboard, and my job was to change the tapes in the planes between flights, reset flags, read out the tapes (each one was a 4-5” metal cube) and plot the information on a large plotting printer. I had just made E-5, so this was a plum assignment, and it was interesting, too...

They had a program you used to set up the axis ranges for the data and which data elements you wanted to display for the flight, then they would analyze the vibration sensor data, temp data, pressure data, throttle position etc. and look for predictive trends. This kind of thing is in all planes now, but they didn’t have it back then.

What made me remember all this is the way we had to save the data for each flight to a paper roll where it would punch those holes in the paper and I labeled and stored all the little roll.

The funny thing was, when using the little program they wrote, if you entered parameters that didn’t make sense, it would say something like “PARAMETER ERROR-TRY AGAIN”. One day, I just couldn’t get it to accept a parameter for some reason, and I kept trying, and after about 10 tries, instead of saying the “PARAMETER ERROR-TRY AGAIN” thing it spit out “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU-ARE YOU IN THE MARINES? TRY AGAIN”.

It surprised me, and I burst out laughing, and the next attempt that failed it said “WHAT DO YOU HAVE ON THE ENDS OF YOUR HANDS-SH*TFINGERS?” I spent the next several minutes deliberately typing wrong commands in to see responses, until after about 10 more it went back to the usual message!

EBCDIC was a real long time ago for me. When I retired I didn’t want to reference anything computer-related ever again. Let the youngsters and H-1Bs keep up with all the latest hardware and software. I was through. KAPUT!

Except - I still jump when the phone rings. I imagine it’s a kind of PTSD retired IT people get after many years of on-call stress. Anyway, someone mentioned EBCDIC and that brought back old memories (nightmares) of pages and pages of core dumps.

I started my career as an Aerosystems Engineer for General Dynamics back in 1966. I did first generation Data Processing as part of the F-111 Flight Test Program at Fort Worth and Edwards AFB. I was assigned to several F-111 test aircraft. There were no formal Computer Science degrees back then, so everything was basically OJT. I used my STEM (Math/Physics/EE) background to accomplish whatever task was assigned to me.

Back then all we had onboard (aside from some cameras and a telemetry link) was a 32 channel analog tape recorder to capture data from the sensors placed throughout the aircraft. Back on the ground we mainly used PDPs to convert analog tape data into digital tapes usable for input to second generation programs on the IBM360 mainframe.

I won’t tell you where, but I have spiked a few error routines with some similar messaging as you described. I started with a simple “HELP I’M TRAPPED At LOCATION xxxxxxx - LET ME OUT” and progressed from there. Computer Operations and management were definitely not amused by some of my error message routines. But hey, always good to leave a little something behind when you change jobs, especially if you have been outsourced by an H-1B.

Good day and Merry Christmas / Happy New Year.

Yes. I know what you mean. I carried a pager for about 30 years (I still do, but I only get paged when all other options have failed and the primary people can’t figure out what to do!)

I worked in Nuclear Medicine and am now in IT, and if I am in a room when a pager goes off, I literally twitch. Not figuratively, literally. If I were sleeping and it went off, I would levitate about a foot off my rack, and my heart would be pounding! I turned off the sound because I couldn’t stand it anymore, and when the thing vibrated, the sound of it vibrating would do the same thing!

Finally, one night as my wife and I were watching television, a pager went off in a commercial and I visibly twitched, which was followed by a nasty curse, and my wife mildly suggested perhaps I should find a different line of work!

I am famous among my friends for throwing a beeping pager over a house.

So, yes. I know EXACTLY what you mean about on-call stress! Exactly.

Anyway, good story! Hope all goes well for you, and have a wonderful pager/phone free Christmas!

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