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JCSM Shareware Collection 1996 September
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ara0.txt
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1995-03-20
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ARA0.TXT Copywright 1991, 1995 (c) by Dave Byter, proliferate freely.
I have been asked how I came to be associated with the strange people who
eventually became ARA. It first, I did not think that it was relevant to our
story, tho now I am not so sure. Obviously, I could keep backtracking forever,
but one character stands out as a link to those early underground ecologists.
In the summer of 1964, I was working as a research chemist at a local paint
company. Joe Jacobus was another chemist there. One day I had gone to Joe's
apartment after work. There I met a most unusual fellow. At first he had
very little to say.
Joe even warned me not to disturb him. I did take a look at the newspaper he
was reading, and was I impressed! I didn't know what language it was, but it
appeared to be one solid block of letters. No spaces, no punctuation, no
paragraphs, just solid letters. When I realized that the letters were mostly
numbers, interspersed with a few other unrecognizable characters, I knew that
he must be some sort of alien.
After a few minutes, he exclaimed, "There's the little bugger!", took a pencil
from behind his ear, and circled something on about the twelfth page. I had
just met my first computer freak.
"I'm tiny. I'm hungry. It's buggy. I'm calculating the survey data for the
new Northway here." That didn't make any more sense than did his newspaper,
but I eventually go it all straight, tho not necessarily in that order.
The three of us piled into his little Triumph and roared off to Mike's
Submarine Sandwich Shop. For those of you unfamiliar with that predecessor to
the fast food, a submarine sandwich was a loaf of French bread horizontally
cut, and stuffed with everything from Italian sausage to Polish pickles. It
weighed a good Kilogram, and cost eighty-five cents. In 1964 money. It looked
like a small submarine.
[As an aside, you could still buy the same thing for the same money today, if
you have some pre-1965 style silver pocket change.]
We bought four of these things and sped off to the college.
Now Tiny was not tiny. The name had nothing to do with the fact that he
weighed a good 150 kilos and could eat two of Mike's submarines at one sitting,
and about six inches of mine that I couldn't finish. Tiny was short for
Vallentine, that's all.
At the college, Tiny pushed his little car up between some pieces of machinery
at the back of the Electrical Engineering Building, and we went in thru the
back door. Upstairs in a room all by itself was "The Computer". I was more
than impressed. Those of you who have only seen today's desktop computers
would have been even more impressed.
One guy was sitting in front of a typewriter and a panel of about a thousand
little blinking lights on this thing that looked like a cross between a desk
and a packing crate for an imported car. Two other guys had piles of paper and
boxes of IBM cards sitting on the rest of the desk and were arguing about
infinite loops and format errors. Beside the computer was a card reader nearly
as big as the computer itself, and a keypunch. The keypunch was a little
gizmo about the size of today's computer that fit on a little desk, not much
bigger than a card table.
Tiny spent a few minutes punching new IBM cards, then walked back over to the
computer/desk. He looked at the rows of little blinkedy glow lamps and
pronounced, "You are still hung in a loop. Let me show you how to find it."
He put a few cards into the reader, added their pile, and with a self-satisfied
ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chomp the card reader ate these cards. Soon the
typewriter was typing at a furious thirty words per minute.
45 09952 00256 VP AA TY
23 00000 16550 TX AB ER
66 16550 00100 SM AB RR
66 16550 00101 SM AB RQ
13 03032 00000 IM SO GD
27 00000 00008 RU 2? TU
86 10010 00323 BZ ΣÆ ÉΓ
ETC ETC ETC ETC ETC ETC
This garbage was what the thinking machine was thinking, and why it thought
that it should think that way. I suppose that if I had been able to think like
an IBM 1620, then I could have made some sense of it. Tiny pushed the HALT
button, circled some line on the third page of this stuff, scribbled something,
and drew a half dozen arrows around on the paper.
Now it happened that Tiny was not only the local computer guru, but also a cave
explorer from his youth in Schoharie County. Since Union College was strictly
an undergraduate school, there were few students with automobiles. When they
needed transportation to the cave party, my car was invited, and I was allowed
to drive it.
Let me emphasize that the people at the Union Outing Club were not involved
with the ARA project. The surveying of the caves and the handling of the
resulting data with computers was started at our Outing Club, but ARA was
strictly the brainchild of the folks from MIT.
That's not to say that we at Union didn't contribute our ideas. They used to
drive over from Boston on weekends to hang out in our caves. Like research
scientists everywhere, we talked about scientific research, even when we
weren't doing it.
Or rather, we were always doing research, even when we weren't doing it.