Flib734
My chemistry professor, Dr. Stan Hill, was furious and looking for me. As I eased the terminal room door shut, I saw him emerging from his office. Sally Lechter, my good friend and fellow grad student, was unlucky enough to be passing by. His voice echoed in the hallway. “Hey, Sally. Have you seen Fred?”
The response was muffled by the heavy metal door I hid behind. The year was 1974 and I was a third-year chemistry graduate student at Rutgers-Newark. Although Dr. Hill gave everyone the impression of being easy-going and informal, he was anything but when it came to his own students. And he wasn’t very happy with me. My distraction with computers had become a serious issue, at least to him. I was supposed to be in the lab cooking up some nasty selenium compounds for a project he barely cared about, except for the grant money it raked in. To me it was stench verses machine ─ a no-brainer.
We were located in a three-story red brick building that used to be a brewery. The department had recently installed two computer terminals in a corner room on the third floor. Computers were still new then, and no one in the department had a clue as to what to do with these terminals. So the room was usually empty. We were, after all, just chemistry geeks with no need for computers. Word processing, the internet, and video games were years away.
The door opened and Sally stuck her head in. “Freddie, you-know-who was looking for you.” She smiled, wiggled her finger at me, and took off down the hall.
Sally was a sleek, mini-skirted brunette that I fell in love with the day I saw her come into our lab looking for some clamps. She was sharp, witty and beautiful. I was pretty sure she liked me.
So what was I doing at the terminal? That’s simple ─ I loved the concept of a ‘thinking machine’ and being able to program it to calculate, to predict, in short, to do things that humans could not. The IBM mainframe supported Fortran, a language I was vaguely
familiar with, thanks in large part to a Saturday morning course in high school. So I taught myself the language by typing in commands and trying to interpret those infamous IBM error messages. It wasn’t easy, but I guess I had a knack for it. In no time at all, I had put together programs designed to help me interpret and predict trends in data that I was generating in the lab. A noble effort, but regardless, Dr. Hill remained unconvinced that any of this had the slightest practical value, and he continued to demand that I spend more time at the bench.
Here’s where my story gets a bit dicey. On one particular morning I began wondering if there was any form of artificial intelligence locked up in the mainframe. Don’t ask me why.
The response was muffled by the heavy metal door I hid behind. The year was 1974 and I was a third-year chemistry graduate student at Rutgers-Newark. Although Dr. Hill gave everyone the impression of being easy-going and informal, he was anything but when it came to his own students. And he wasn’t very happy with me. My distraction with computers had become a serious issue, at least to him. I was supposed to be in the lab cooking up some nasty selenium compounds for a project he barely cared about, except for the grant money it raked in. To me it was stench verses machine ─ a no-brainer.
We were located in a three-story red brick building that used to be a brewery. The department had recently installed two computer terminals in a corner room on the third floor. Computers were still new then, and no one in the department had a clue as to what to do with these terminals. So the room was usually empty. We were, after all, just chemistry geeks with no need for computers. Word processing, the internet, and video games were years away.
The door opened and Sally stuck her head in. “Freddie, you-know-who was looking for you.” She smiled, wiggled her finger at me, and took off down the hall.
Sally was a sleek, mini-skirted brunette that I fell in love with the day I saw her come into our lab looking for some clamps. She was sharp, witty and beautiful. I was pretty sure she liked me.
So what was I doing at the terminal? That’s simple ─ I loved the concept of a ‘thinking machine’ and being able to program it to calculate, to predict, in short, to do things that humans could not. The IBM mainframe supported Fortran, a language I was vaguely
familiar with, thanks in large part to a Saturday morning course in high school. So I taught myself the language by typing in commands and trying to interpret those infamous IBM error messages. It wasn’t easy, but I guess I had a knack for it. In no time at all, I had put together programs designed to help me interpret and predict trends in data that I was generating in the lab. A noble effort, but regardless, Dr. Hill remained unconvinced that any of this had the slightest practical value, and he continued to demand that I spend more time at the bench.
Here’s where my story gets a bit dicey. On one particular morning I began wondering if there was any form of artificial intelligence locked up in the mainframe. Don’t ask me why.