Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Dick Loop-Invariant, the last mainframe programmer of The Old School, has recently retired to Duncardpunchin, a home on the coast for his ilk. He and his ilk now both live together happily with their life-long collection of unlikely rhymes from Marilyn Monroe songs; and when Verity went to meet him, Dick was delighted to reminisce, and to plug his book.
Verity Stob: Dick, I understand you have a new book out, written as a response to a recent history of the Net "Where wizards stay up late"?
Dick Loop-Invariant: That's quite correct, young lady. Us mainframers have been taking a lot of stick over the last 10 or 20 years, one way and another, so I felt it was time to tell the real story. And I don't wish to boast, but I'm told that it has gone straight to 819,415 on "Amazon," whatever that is.
VS: And would you like to remind our readers of the title?
DL-I: It's called "Where respectable people get up by 7:15 am to put on a shirt and tie."
VS: Looking through it, I get the impression that you headed up some pretty major projects in your time.
DL-I: Yes indeedy. For example, one of the later projects that I was involved in was called "electronic mail," although that was a bit of a mouthful so we shortened it to "electron mail." The idea was that everybody would be able to send each other messages directly from their keyboard or punched tape terminals, without ever having to buy a stamp.
VS: You never.
DL-I: We coded it all in Fortran IV. It was a bit of a risk at the time, but my colleague Hilary Stochastic-Process felt we needed the power of a high-level language. I can well remember the day we first got it working. I was sitting at my desk with the terminal, Hilary was in the room next door...
VS: Wouldn't it have been a better test if she had been further away?
DL-I: Who's "she," the cat's mother? Oh, I understand your mistake. Hilary was of course, ahem, a chap. Ladies of the fair sex weren't really encouraged to enter the programming profession in those days. Besides, it really wasn't a suitable project for female involvement. Can you imagine all the twittering that would have gone on if women had been directly involved with Electron?
VS: It's a consideration.
DL-I: No offence to your good self, my dear. Anyway, Hilary went into the room next door, he ran his stored program and then I received the world's first ever electron message. I've kept the printout safely. Here it is:
MR LOOP-INVARIANT, COME HERE, I WANT YOU.
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VS: A historic moment. This would have been in 1960...?
DL-I: It was 1994. It was an interesting idea, but I don't see it really taking off. You'd need a really big lump of iron to make it work, something that everybody in the world could log into at once. And as for wiring up everybody's home with a 3270...
VS: What a shame. But before that, I hear you had a hand in an early craze for multimedia?
DL-I: You have to remember that the hardware we worked with was very different, especially when it came to the Man/Machine Interface. It called for different skills. The great pioneers have been forgotten: the man who ported PONG to a teletype machine, the chap who invented the strip of red transparent plastic you could stick over the side of an electric video terminal to show when it was nearing the end of the roll...
VS: But surely...
DL-I: Ah, the printers we had in those days! Not piffling little gadgets that sit on your desk, "jet" this and "laser" that. Oh no. We had behemoths the size of three VW Beetles that made a noise like a steel foundry and took proper green-and-white striped fanfold, 132 columns wide. My favourite took up half of the eighth floor. We nicknamed it "Giant Redwood."
VS: Because of its size?
DL-I: More because of the volume of paper it ate in a day. I used to like to get a printout after every compilation, so that I could file it in the big filing cabinet. I used to send Lesley trotting up and down the stairs every few minutes to pick it up...
VS: Didn't he mind?
DL-I: What? Oh no, I see. No, Lesley wasn't a programmer, she was a young woman. Girls may not be any cop at writing code but, and I don't mind admitting this, you make the best paper monkeys. It's your dainty little fingers. Ideal for clearing paper jams out of the big cogs and gears of the printers.
VS: Except married women, whose rings might cause dangerous electrical shorts?
DL-I: Goodness, that's perceptive of you Miss Stob. You are a little brain box! How did you work that out?
VS: Call it feminine intuition. But you were telling me about your multimedia application?
DL-I: Ah yes. Well, I guess there is no harm in admitting it now. I was the man behind the picture of Marilyn Monroe done in ordinary uppercase letters and digits. Using the different amounts of ink in the characters to get shading effects, do you see? Took hundreds of FORMAT statements. Every mainframe shop in the world had a copy of that program. If I had two pounds sterling for every copy of that picture that got printed out and pinned to the wall then removed and thrown away by order of the college authorities, I might be able to meet the bill for royalties owed to the copyright holder of the original photo.
VS: But it was only a printout. I'd have thought that would be a monomedium rather than multimedia?
DL-I: Talking of La Monroe, I'm being a terrible host. May I offer you a little something? "Valise-full/peaceful" from Lazy? "Plastic/sarcastic" from A Fine Romance?
VS: No thank you, I don't.
DDJ
