BTW I am 2nd generation Dr. Merrill I bow to the power...very cool... BTW I am 2nd generation IT ......Been around computers or EDP as it was once called since the 50's....Mom and Dad both in the industry Scott J Ford
________________________________ From: Barry Merrill <ba...@mxg.com> To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2008 12:53:24 PM Subject: Re: Computer History Museum In 1966 at Purdue's Labratory for Agricultural Remote Processing, LARS, later renamed to the Labratory for Applied Remote Sensing, where K.S. Fu's pattern recognition algorithms were implemented and validated (using 16 channels of spectral data with 6 bits for the amplitude of each channel, gathered on a DEC PDP- in a DC-3 that flew at 2000 feet over a 5 mile long strip of Indiana fields), we took delivery of S/360-44 serial number two (number one was in Pook). I had implemented the Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform in Fortran directly from their original paper on the University's 7090, and had moved it and my programming of the Karhunen-Loeve transform using polynomial approximation for my Masters Thesis to the new Model 44, using an AM radio to listen to the program execution to detect when programming errors send it into a never-ending loop, and to hear when it went from slow to fast loops. Diagnosis of those never-ending loops involved using address stops and single step instruction toggles from the console. Twice, my program abruptly stopped, redlighting the console, and IBM engineers came on site, both times finding that I had actually burned out the transistors in the floating point divide unit. After the second failure, they returned with a floating point divide unit that had been redesigned with a new heat sink added to fix the problem. Originally, there was no disk with the Model 44, running TOS as I recall, with five tape drives, and the Fortran compiler was only on tape - it took all five drives to compile and punch out the deck which was then read in and executed, and all five tapes were spinning during every compile. After writing my own program for the FFT, the Lab directory and my major professor, Dave Landgrebe, gave me a note from the computer center that there was a new FFT subroutine that had been written by Tukey himself available from something called the SHARE library. Upon examination, I discovered I was at best only a coder and Tukey was a real programmer; whereas my major loop was 250 or so Fortran statements, I marvelled at the correct way to do it, in about 25 statements, and thus was introduced to the SHARE program library. My part-time job at LARS was to create the "Ground Truth" data base, well before the actual flight. On the day of the flight, the agronomists were going to photo and measure and record the plant statistics from each field and then populate my database for correlation with the spectral data, but as there was no actual field data yet, I created several sample fields of opium poppies and cannibis to show the agronomists what the reports would eventually look like, and they were all humoroed by my samples. However, one Saturday afternoon the campus police showed up at my apartment and told me I was urgently needed at LARS and took me there; it seems that the U.S. State Department had been discussing with their Turkish counterparts the future possibility of using the LARS programs to detect those crops, but had assurred the Turks that the project was still in its infantcy, and had not been trained on any of those crops. Unfortunately, one of the agronomists had shown the Turks one of my sample reports, so they assumed they were being lied to by the State Dept rep, who dragged me out to the site to meet with the Turks and, finally, having accepted that I was the author and just a college student programmer, they did finally realize this was just a joke. The Ground Truth was written in FORTRAN II, which did not have character literals; to print CORN, I had to set the variable CORN equal to the decimal value that, when written with A4 (as I recall) format, would print CORN, etc., for each text value. Just as I finished, Fortran IV became available. Merrilly Christmas Herbert W. Barry Merrill, PhD President-Programmer Merrill Consultants MXG Software 10717 Cromwell Drive Dallas, TX 75220 214 351 1966 tel 214 350 3694 fax www.mxg.com ba...@mxg.com P.S. I first programmed a digital computer, an IBM 610 in September, 1959 as a Sophomore at the University of Notre Dame; who of you all will I have to outlive to claim to have been programming digital computers longer than anyone else?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
