Monday, October 23, 2006

 

Old Timers

Tonight was family night. And per our new tradition, when the intercom buzzed and Michael said -- "It's ready, come on up", I waddled up the stairs to have dinner with the family upstairs.

Christine had all the fixings for tacos and Joshua was getting a taste of new things in creamed baby-style chicken. At least one tooth has surfaced so far, so meat is being introduced into his diet. Thank God I don't have to do the diapers, since from now on they get more odiferous. Nathan piled up his gordito flat bread with tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, spicey meat and a little mexican rice, a la Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.

Michael finally came to the table from his computer, both Christine and Michael keeping a secret they wanted to show me - some thing new. A toy gadget for Michael.

Michael revealed it to me. It was a finger sized thin, digital something with a nice navy enamal finish. It was a nano-ipod sort of thing about the size of a small pocket knife. It represented 1G of computer memory. Most folks load their entire music CD collections (mp3 and wav) on this little thing so they can

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes!

They shall have music wherever they go.

Whirling back in memory to the early 1950's our family gathered at 6 o'clock on Saturday nights to sit and eat dinner and listen to Gunsmoke on the radio.

We usually had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, tomato gravey and a tossed vinegarette salad. The top of the meatloaf was garnished with strips of crisp bacon. The meatloaf was made with 4 lbs of ground beef, 2 cups of breadcrumbs, 3 eggs, 1 cup copped white onions, salt and pepper. It was all kneaded together, pushed through our fingers slimed with the egg. We worked and worked it, finally shaping the beef loaf. We cooked the meatloaf on a cake rack on a foil covered cooky sheet for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Then we poured a can of Campbell's tomato soup across the top of the loaf and added the uncooked bacon slices. We cooked the loaf another 30 to 40 minutes until the loaf was browned. The rack lifted the loaf out of the beef juices and allowed the loaf to dry a bit.

We made the gravey from the tomato drippings and a little of the beef juice in a pot. We added butter, water and some flour to make a roux and then added the tomato and juice flavorings.

We made the potatoes about an hour before we started the loaf preparation. We peeled about 12 potatoes, diced them and started a large pot of salted water boiling and added the small bits of potatoes. We watched the pot for about 10 minutes until it really started boiling. We turned the heat down and then we stirred the potatoes, moving fresher potatoes to the bottom of the pot and keeping the water just at a low roil. We did this for about another 15 minutes until the potatoes started to break up and turn mushy. We removed the pot from the stove and drained the potatoes in a collander and returned them to the warm pot. We added half a stick of butter, half a cup of milk and about 3 tbs of sugar. We used a standard masher and smashed and mixed the potatoes until they were creamy and had a nice salty, buttery taste. We put a lid on them and put the pot on the back of the stove to wait for the rest of the meal.

The major cook was doing the preparations for the meatloaf. Next person down in age was doing the potatoes, the salad and three-clove dinner rolls. All was coordinated so that the meal was on the table just as the theme for Gunsmoke started. Not a word was spoken as all listened to the one hour story plot unfold. Miss Kitty, Doc, Matt and Chester were pitted against the wildness of the west and all the obvious bad guys.

If our finances were up that week, perhaps we had a lemon meringue pie for dessert. Whoever had kitchen clean up duty got to keep the radio going and listen to The Shadow or some other radio theater offering while they worked.

The radio program went on from about 1952 until 1961. I think we listened until about 1955. We got our TV about the time of Queen Elizabeth's coronation in June of 1953. However, we kept the radio dinners going for a long while before the TV trays started to be used with daily frequency in the back room of the house -- in front of the TV set.

One of the things that Michael's gadget can do is download and save radio shows like Ira Glass' This American Life (on NPR). I can see him riding the Marta train home from work, ear plugs in place, listening to his stories and tunes, his nano-podie thingie hanging from a chain round his neck.

In 1963, after I got married, I went to work for the Friden Company in San Leandro, California. At that time, the factory was producing small electric office machines -- adding machines, comptometers, multiline telephone reception units, etc. I was working in the Account Receivable department, producing the monthly customer bills. In October 1963, Friden was bought out by the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

I was fascinated by Friden's Flexowriter machine. It was an interesting pre-cursor to the word processer. With this machine, you could do two things -- on 1-inch wide (6, 7 or 8 channel) cardboardy pink paper, you could punch out in code the names and addresses of your customers. You could make 20 or 30 names on each punch tape strip. If you ordered the tapes alphabetically, you could add a new name to your customer lists by simply clipping the tape with scissors and splicing in a piece of punch tape with the new code, scotch taping your joints. This type of tape strip, with 'variable' codes like customer names was the 'object memory' for the machine to use.

The 'chads' or the bits of paper that were punched out fell down into a catcher called a 'bit bucket'. Since, only the chad is produced by a positive punch out on the tape, it represented a "bit" of information. Thus evolved the famous programer's term 'bit bucket' for the place where all unwanted, discarded or lost bits of data disappear, never to be recovered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_bucket

Another kind of tape we could make was a 'program memory'. On this tape we could block out form letters or monthly bills. The tape would contain all the standard things like

The operator could then hand type the current month's amount due. The machine then typed the standard "our terms are 30 days net 2 percent", etc. "Thank you very much, Accounts Receivable, Friden Company".

You could attach an auxillary reader and perform mail merging by adding the individual names to your form letter. The resulting product was high quality, contained individual variables and appeared to have been individually typed.

Here is the Wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexowriter

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_merge

And down memory lane

http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/friden/

I was a Flexo-babe, lol (see picture).

Overtime I went on to other temporary word processing jobs, staying proficient in all the latest office equipment. Punch tapes evolved into punch cards -- object decks and program decks. All my program decks revolved around business forms and documents.

Us 'office girls' got to use these machines based on the application of the sociologist Erving Goffman's rule that those with the least social status in an organization have the jobs that actually use their hands on some thing or body.

Contrast this status with a college computer department in the 1960s and 1970s. Access to the computer was limited to men in white coats behind closed doors. Users came to a windowed wall, in a single file line, presented their two boxes of punched cards (obj/prog), and received an estimate when their cards and computer printouts could be retrieved for study. Lowest status folks stayed outside, highest status inside, closest to the 'toy'. This paradigm prevaled during the 1940s thru the lower 1980s.

"Users" became a snide and derogatory stigma, of the same order as the barbarians sniveling at the gate for handouts of 4-day old putrid meat. And definitely, "No Women Need Apply" to this very private club on the college campus or deep in the national laboratories of Livermore, Berkeley or Stanford.

In the mid-1970's my husband brought home computer junked pieces from the dumpsters around where he was working in Silicon Valley. He and my son Michael would dream of making home computers from this stuff and on several occasions, they actually succeeded. We had working printers, a graphics (Michaelangelo) monitor, memory boxes with wideband cables leading into dusty boxes (no fans in those days) hiding the motherboards.

Uncle Don McCarty who was engineering at Ampex would get replacement chips. My husband Bill would barter among HP fellow workers for computer items and they all gathered for beer swilling Friday afternoon bragging sessions in Palo Alto cocktail taverns.

The mood was Power to the People -- get computers out of the raised floor, halogen gas protected areas and down on to the desktop were they could do work and be available for the latest cute little amusing game program.

The portable table tops in our carpeted garage were covered with these almost and barely working machines. Interest was high. Radio Shacks TR-80 became the favorite home machine.

My son Michael had his first paying job by collating the Dublin city parks and recreation survey results. He was 17 (1982) and got $120. Both his sisters fooled around with the machines at home. Janel worked the graphics programs to draw with her mouse cursor for hours of time. Diana connected up with the Alamo and with the Livermore Valley Pop-net/IRC groups and spent time talking with her on-line friends.

Our family from then on always had a running, perhaps antiquated, PC.

I continued to work temporary jobs through out the 70s and the 80s. Primarly word processing in the science and research labratory facilities like Berkeley National Lab, Departments of Engineering and in the National Chemistry Resource Laboratory, at Clorox Research and at Clorox HQ and for several years at the PG&E Research Facility working on the annual production of 316(b) Clean Water Act Compliance reports.

Most of this time I used either an IBM System/36 mid-level computer or a full blown enterprise-wide Wang System. Long live the floppy disk in those days.

In 1979 at the National Resource for Chemistry lab up at Berkeley, I used the brand new DEC PDP-11. This was my first experience with the Unix operating system and with the 'dot-command' programming language for word processing troff/nroff. It was only later that I came across the Wordstar application for the Apple IIe desktop computer that had the same look and feel of these Unix text-processing programming languages.

Overtime two of my children migrated very early into computer using careers. Michael worked temp at AT&T for several years. He went into consulting full time doing system application design and implementation. He has more than 15 years MORE experience compared to others his same age and he is project designer leader on all his development teams now.

Diana worked in California, Georgia and then Virginia. She worked at AOL before they went public and she continues doing system implementation project management consulting in the New York City area. She was an original 'Babe on the Net' and a key resource for Wired Magazine's report on the status of women working in the digital world.

So now we come around to nano-pods and radio shows in the new millennium. In 50+ years, we still take pleasure in the oral tradition of storytelling. Listening while we work, we just have some interesting tools to do it.




Comments:
driving from manhattan to our home in queens tonight, larry and i listened to ricky gervais podcast on my treo700wx while i played with his samsung a900 which has a gps so i clicked a little button and it brought up a map of our exact location and we determined a quick route out of the traffic jam... and i clicked over to another feature and took a picture of an interesting billboard... all with phones... aint life grand
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?