My 2nd Computer Was a UNIVAC I

Computing in the 1960s

For beginning programmers, it was an exciting time. The 704 was, in effect, a very expensive personal computer. Only one person and program could use it at a time, and often program exe­cution, as well as dumping the evidence of failure, was done at the system console, as fast as one could figure out what to do.

I remember writing a program disassembler that would take the substantially modified object pro­grams described above, together with a symbol table, and produce a reasonable assembly language listing of the modified code. For some jobs, I wrote a one-pass octal assembler because the IBM assembler was too cumbersome. Constant human intervention was required, causing many errors. Finally, I wrote an operating sys­tem that would do batch job initi­ation, automatic job sequencing, system resource management, error recovery, and accounting.

Sometime in 1960, the main offices of Combustion Engineer­ing moved from New York City to Windsor, CT, where the Nuclear Division was headquar­tered. One of the people who made the move was NYU’s own Edi Franceschini, who had temporarily left the life of the arts to immerse himself in the real world. “Big tea kettles,” as he referred to Combustion’s boiler business, seemed right in the middle of the real world to him. Those of you who know Edi will appreciate why, as he more fully understood the path that he had taken, he retreated from that busi­ness into the world of computing and abstract mathematics.

After leaving Combustion Engineering in 1962, I went on to Yale, first to work and then to the Graduate School, then to the United Nations in Washington, DC to do computer technology transfer work in developing countries. I left the UN in 1986 to work at Northwestern Univer­sity, and after 4 years in an envi­ronment that seemed parochial compared to New York and the rest of the world, I looked for­ward to the opportunity to return to a more advanced and cosmo­politan environment. I returned to New York University in 1990, this time to take over the Direct­orship of the Academic Comput­ing Facility from Max Goldstein, who had handled much of NYU’s computing needs for over 30 years.

Much had changed at NYU since 1958. The Courant comput­ing group had formalized itself as the Courant Mathematics and Computing Laboratory (CMCL) in 1964, as Warren Weaver Hall was being constructed, and had installed serial no. 4 of the CDC 6600 as its computing platform. By the time I arrived, Control Data equipment had just been phased out of use, and there was a plethora of systems being used for various purposes.

One very fortuitous develop­ment in the evolution of the CMCL and its transition into the ACF was NYU’s early involve­ment in computer networking. In the early days of scientific com­puting, there were different types of computers, each with a unique operating system, programming language, and data format. Interoperability was the excep­tion, not the rule.