Tuesday, January 12, 2010

You've Been Replaced

     My first assignment in the Air Force was as an enlisted computer operator (from 1978 to 1982) at Hurlburt Field, near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. I was assigned to the Data Automation branch within the 1st Special Operations Wing.
     The computer I worked on was a Burroughs 3500 mainframe. The system consisted of a room full of components including tape drives, disk drives, a punch card reader, a card punch, a card interpreter, a line printer, the central processing unit, and the console which included a teletype. There was no video screen. All the commands were typed into the teletype, and the commands along with the computer's responses were recorded on continuous fan-fold paper.
    That computer handled all the administrative data processing for an entire Air Force base (including aircraft maintenance, personnel, finance, etc.) and yet the computer you're reading this on has more computing power than that room full of equipment had. Such is the march of progress.
    We operated around the clock in three shifts with at least two operators on duty at all times. There was plenty of work to do as we had to change reels of magnetic tape, load cards into the punch card reader, move cards from the card punch to the card interpreter, and take the printouts from the line printer, separate them, and place them in the proper output bins.
     The line printer was amazingly fast at 1100 lines per minute, and with 66 lines on each page, it could go through a box of continuous fan-fold paper in a hurry. Most jobs were printed on single-ply paper, but plenty of others were printed on multi-part paper with carbon paper interleaved so the customer could have multiple copies of the same printout. We were constantly moving boxes of paper.
     There were about 25-30 people in Data Automation, with a captain in charge. We were divided into three sections: Computer Operations (15-20 people) lead by a master sergeant; Systems Control (6-8 people who worked with the customers and set up the computer jobs we ran), also headed up by a master sergeant; and Resource Management (4 people).
     It was a fairly relaxed environment for a military outfit, and even those of us who were junior enlisted called the master sergeants by their first names. Dave was in charge of Operations, and Tom had Systems Control. Dave and Tom shared an office. Nobody called the captain by his first name.
     Dave wore his hair slicked back, and I could imagine him in his high school days wearing a white T-shirt with a pack rolled up in his sleeve. Dave had recently cross-trained into computer operations from another career field and didn't have the same depth of technical knowledge as those of us who were hands-on with the computer every day. His job was to manage us, but we figured his chief skills were smoking cigarettes and drinking coffeeevery time I saw him he had a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. No hands were available for getting anything else done.
     Most of us operators were in our 20s with lots of energy and active imaginations. Becoming proficient as an operator took a lot of diligent effort to learn the system with its many commands and complexities. Once we were fully qualified, the work became routine and we could think about other thingslike fun. There are lots of stories to tell, but this post will focus on the day we had CPR training in the office.
     Working around all that high-voltage equipment required us to know CPR, so our bosses scheduled an instructor to come to the office to train us. The instructor brought a training mannequin (brand name: Resusci-Annie) on which we would learn how to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions. After the class, the instructor left Resusci-Annie in our office to train the next group. Dave left the office to run some errands, and while he was gone our wheels started turning.
     All Resusci-Annie could do was lay therea skill set not that different from Dave's. So, we put her in Dave's chair, propped her feet up on his desk, put her fingers through the handle on his coffee mug, and put a cigarette between the fingers of her other hand. A lookout watched the parking lot for Dave's return, and on his signal we lit Annie's cigarette.
     We all tried to look busy as Dave walked in. We were dead silent when he entered his office, so we could easily hear him say, "What the h---?" The whole place broke up when Tom answered with, "Dave, you've been replaced."