My First Computer Job

Getting My Feet Wet as a Computer Operator

By Charles L Harmon

I analyzed rocks brought back from the moon, 'back in the day' - using an IBM 360/44

 

Good Luck or What?

Back in the distant past I had completed my Associate Degree (2 year degree) in Computer Science. That field was new in those ancient days. I started looking for my first computer job, close to my house if possible. It wasn’t like today, in the 2008-2012s when getting a job, any job is almost an impossibility.

I was lucky, and quickly found a job only a few minutes away from my home in Pasadena, California. It was with a small engineering company. Just up my alley because I had started college as an engineering major. I became a computer “digitizer” for a small engineering company and operated a drafting board contraption that allowed me to digitize whatever images or drawings I put on the drafting board. It was an interesting sort of thing and I quickly became a master of it.

I was not, however, digitizing engineering drawings, or blueprints, but a series of scribble-like drawings that represented sound waves. The waves were reflections of sound under the ground detected by microphones placed in discrete underground locations where scientists and engineers thought oil was located.

The job was very interesting, but my interests was talking with the young PHDs working there. Another major interest was being able to use a neighboring company’s high speed computer to analyze the tapes I would create from my digitized drawings. Their computer was just a hop-skip-and-a jump from where I worked.

I became friends with the engineers that owned and ran the company and other engineers that came to use their computer. Computers were very expensive in those days and few small companies could afford to have a powerful IBM computer like they had. I used their computer almost everyday and was able to run my own jobs.

A few months into my digitizing job I was approached by the owners of that company where I used their computers and asked if I was interested in operating their computer for them. They were getting a lot more customers and needed someone who knew what they were doing to operate their machine, an IBM 360/44, one of the rare high speed scientific computers of that day. It was the original 64 bit computer. PC 64 bit computers just recently came into fashion a few years ago in the PC marketplace. However, the machine I worked on was not a PC. They hadn’t been invented yet. It was a full fledged mainframe computer. I mean full-fledged because computers in those days were monsters and most took up a small or even a large room.

 

 

The offer I received was one I could not refuse. It was for me to operate their computer for their customers plus their own proprietary programs which they also charged other companies to use. It started me off on an almost four year journey into running some super sophisticated computer programs designing zoom lenses, analyzing rocks from the moon, and many other specialized engineering software programs. They had well over 200 clients, all engineers in one field or another that ran their jobs where I worked. In fact, I was the one that ran all their jobs.

It was great working there and I really hated to leave, but I had to finish one class for my bachelor’s degree at California State University, Los Angeles, and needed one more class only offered in the daytime. That great job ended, yet it had started my long, long journey into the field of computers, engineering, programming, and now the Internet.

Was that Good Luck or What?

I had learned Fortran programming and was fascinated by it. I had made up my mind I wanted to be a programmer after working with Pat, their Fortran programmer, and that was going to be my career.

Some questions to consider

Was getting the computer digitizer job good luck?

Was getting offered the computer operator job good luck?

Did learning Fortran there influence my 35+ years of programming?

Were all my good programming jobs and programming consulting a result of my digitizer or operator job?

Copyright © 2010 – 2012 Charles L Harmon

 

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