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Science / Space Race

[November 1, 1964] Time (sharing) travel

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by Ida Moya

New Toys for Los Alamos

As the Traveler said, things have really been heating up in Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL). And what with President Kennedy being taken from us so traumatically last year, it has all been too much. We have been struggling with national security while mourning the loss of our leader, and also attending to a deluge of new computers that are coming into the lab. Things have calmed down a little so I am now able to share a few secrets with you again.

Page from LA-1 document
Page from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LA-1

I've been busy helping with the preparation of the upcoming declassification of the Los Alamos Primer. This is the very first official technical report we produced at LASL, numbered LA-1. It is based on 5 lectures introducing the principles of nuclear weapons. These lectures were given in 1943 by LASL librarian Charlotte Serber’s husband, the physicist Robert Serber. You bet it's release took a long time to get this approved. Doing the work to cross out all those “Secret Limited” stamps and restamp each page with "Unclassified" also took some time.

Los Alamos is so important to the nation’s top-secret defense work that we are able to commandeer the first of each of the fastest computers manufactured. We had Serial no. 1 of the IBM 701 “Defense Calculator” in 1953. LASL also tested one of the first of 8 IBM 7030 “Stretch” computers, which even with its uptime shortcomings can calculate so fast that some people call it a “Supercomputer.”

I’m sure I also told you that we finally received our IBM 7090 computer. This equipment is being used for big science calculations around atomic energy, guided missile control, strategic planning (cryptanalysis, weather prediction, game theory), and jet engine design. I'm sure it is no surprise when I tell you we are using it to simulate nuclear explosions. This computer also has what they call an “upgrade,” the addition of more memory and input-output capability. The upgraded computer is called an IBM 7094.

Scientists at LASL, Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working on better ways for computer operators to use the IBM 7094. Rather than custom-writing each computer operation and calculation that have to be done, they are working on a kind of “supervisor” to allow for more than one person to use the computer at the same time. This "operating system" is called CTSS or Compatible Time Sharing System.

Robert Fano sitting at a teletype
I don't have a current picture of Marge, but here is MIT Professor Robert Fano using CTSS from a Teletype ASR 35.

Sharing the Wealth

It's difficult to convey just how important this will be. Computers are hideously expensive things, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are also vital for any scientific institution's operations. Currently, only one person at a time can use them, which results in one of two situations. Either one person at a time has a monopoly on the machine during for the time it takes to compose and enter a program into the machine (incredibly inefficient) or programs are written "off-line" and run in a "batch". This latter solution ensures that the computer is always running, but it means no one can access the computer in real-time, and it might take days to get results (or notice that the program failed to run correctly!)

With time-sharing, several people can use a computer at once, running different programs in real-time. While the performance might not be as efficient for the computer, since it is accommodating multiple processes at once, the increased efficiency for the operator should more than make up for it.

One of my colleagues at MIT, Marjorie Merwin-Dagget, co-wrote a paper with Robert C. Daly and MIT lab head Fernando J. Corbato (Corby) about the CTSS operating system. You can have a look at it here An Experimental TIme Sharing System.

The Mother of Invention

Marge majored in math, taught for a couple of years, then found a position doing calculations and differential equations at an engineering lab. In the mid-50s, one of Marge’s female colleagues at this lab was sent to MIT to learn about the Whirlwind computer, and when this colleague came back, she taught her about how to code for Whirlwind.

Marge then leveraged this knowledge to code applications for a card punch calculator, an IBM 407 accounting machine, which was much quicker than the manual equipment their lab had been using. This clever coding work helped her land a job from Prof. Frank Verzuh in the MIT computer center. Marge got her friend Robert "Bob" Daly a job there too, because he was so skilled programming the IBM 407.

IBM 407 Accounting Machine showing detail of plugboard.
The IBM 407 Accounting Machine is "programmed" by changing wires on this plugboard.

One of Marge's first assignments was to compare assembly language programming to FORTRAN programming. Her findings are that FORTRAN is quicker to use and easier for other programmers to understand. She quickly became the FORTRAN expert of her group. She even got to work with the brilliant John McCarthy. John has been promoting the notion of timesharing computer systems at MIT and beyond. These computers are so fast that, John reasons, that several people can use them at once.

Marge tells me that Corby thought she and Bob are the best programmers on the staff. CTSS started  as a demo, to demonstrate the feasibility of computer timesharing. This demo turned into a viable system, something people wanted to actually use. She worked one-on-one a lot with Corby, rehashing the problems. They ended up working a lot at odd hours, staying up late going over listings and working out the problems. Kind of like those “hackers” I told you about last year. She was so excited when she told me that it finally worked for two Flexowriters.

Fernando Corbato stands amidst an IBM 7090 computer system.
MIT's Fernando Corbato standing amidst some of an IBM 7090 computer system at MIT.

Corby worked on programming the supervisor and queueing, while Marge took the task of coding interrupt handling, saving the state of the machine, commands, character handling, and a method for inputting and editing lines for the demos. Bob Daly was best at translating this to the mechanical working of the computer.

After co-writing this paper, Marge got married and took a leave of absence after her first child was born. She did return to MIT last year (1963), and is working part-time on smaller support projects outside the mainstream of CTSS development. It’s troubling how difficult it is for a woman to juggle fulfilling technical work with the demands of raising a young family.

Things to Come

Next time, I will tell you about our newest Supercomputer, the CDC 6600. This remarkable machine, designed by that wag Seymour Cray, is being installed in Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory right now. It is so fast and hot that it has to be cooled by Freon, which is making for a lot of fuss with air conditioning technicians coming and going to the lab. I spend a lot of time making copies of "Site Preparation Guide" manuals for everyone from the managers to the technicians. There's a lot more to these computers than just programming languages, that's for sure.  I hear that IBM is working on a new computer system, the 360. One of its requirements is that the pieces be able to fit through standard doors, and ride in standard elevators. Guess buyers are getting tired of having to break through walls to get their computers installed!

CDC 6600 computer system
Installation manual photo of the CDC 6600. Look at that display console with the two round screens, perfect decor for your evil lair.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science / Space Race

[Aug. 14, 1963] Engineers at Play (Spacewars!, hacking, and the PDP-1)

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[Want to talk to the Journey crew and fellow fans?  Come join us at Portal 55! (Ed.)]


by Ida Moya

A War in Space, in the Computer

Last month the traveler reviewed the August 1963 issue of Galaxy magazine. His assessment of this issue was that it contained standout stories by lesser authors, and lesser stories by standout authors. But one thing our intrepid traveler did not mention was Frederik Pohl’s editorial about his visit to M.I.T.’s computer section to play a game called Spacewar! on one of their computers.

Why is that a big deal?  Because Spacewar! is one of the very first "computer games," and possibly the very first not based on an existing game (Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Tennis, etc.)


Editor Frederik Pohl’s editorial about Spacewar. Note too the ubiquitous advertisement for the Rosicrucians. I wonder what that is all about?

Pohl waxes poetic, imagining himself to be the Fenachrone while his opponent is Dick Seaton. He used a simple handheld control to fly spaceships programmed in the computer to accelerate, steer, and shoot torpedoes at one another across a cathode-screen readout. I had to look it up – those characters are from the Skylark of Space series, a work by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., originally serialized in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in the 1930s.

Pohl doesn’t tell us what kind of computer he saw Spacewar being played on, nor does he name the people responsible for programming the computer to play such an active and compelling game. But I can take a guess from what I have seen about computing – it is a PDP-1, a Programmed Data Processor-1, made by Digital Equipment Corporation.

A new way to use the Computer

These young men at M.I.T. are a different generation from the buttoned-down physicists and computer scientists I work with here at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The computer users here in the Theoretical Physics or “T” division tend to be very serious about their computing, and there is no time for frivolous use of these expensive machines. The IBM 7090 and other equipment we have is carefully guarded, and has no time for games.


The TX-0 computer at M.I.T. (Image courtesy Computer History Museum)

From what I hear, these fellows at M.I.T. are a bunch of unwashed boys who emerged from the model railroad club to play with this spare computer called a TX-0. This TX-0 is a transistorized version of another one-off military computer called Whirlwind, also developed at M.I.T. These young men are not doing anything like serious physics or science, but are rather doing these useless but extremely clever things like making programs that convert Arabic numerals to Roman numerals in as few steps as possible. These kids could only get time on the TX-0 in the middle of the night, when other people aren’t using the valuable computer time, so they have very undisciplined habits and working hours. I hear that they call what they are doing “hacking.”


Brochure for Friden Flexowriter (Image courtesy Living Computers: Museum + Labs)

One interesting thing about this “hacking” and the computers they use is that, instead of using punched cards, like the batch processing we do on our IBM Stretch, they use a Friden Flexowriter, an unwieldy sort of teletypewriter, to make punched paper tapes of programs that they then directly feed into the computer. The hackers have direct access to the computer, and can fix programs themselves, rather than having to give their card deck to an operator, and hope that the results come out. That is what Pohl is talking about in his article when he says “…add another tape.”


The PDP-1 at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

A couple of year ago, in 1961, one of the designers of the TX-0, Ken Olsen, founded a company he calls Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC donated PDP-1 serial number 1 to M.I.T’s Research Lab for Electronics, and these hackers have been playing with it ever since. One of these young men, with the unlikely moniker “Slug” Russell, is a big fan of science fiction, including the swashbuckling works of E.E. Smith. He and his friends designed this “computer game,” presented on the 19-inch DEC Type 30 display. The game includes a lot of realistic physics in the movement of the spaceships, and a background star field based on a real star map. They must have a lot of time on their hands.

The leader of “T” division here at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Roger Lazarus, is suspicious of these small “time-sharing” computers like the PDP-1. He would rather invest in larger computers where all the power is used for calculating our nuclear tests, rather than sharing the power across a number of users. So we have not gotten our own PDP-1 at LASL. However, our sister institution, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (once the University of California radiation Laboratory at Livermore), received a PDP-1 in 1961.

Cecilia Larsen and the PDP-1


Cecilia Larsen, center, working on the PDP-1 at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

Cecilia Larsen, my colleague at LRL, has told me all about working with this PDP-1.

Cecilia has an interesting story of how she got into computing. She is a native of Livermore, California, where her Portugese immigrant parents owned a small general store. She received her B.A. from Dominican College in San Rafael with a full scholarship, and then went on to UC Berkeley where she achieved an MA in history, a general secondary teaching certificate, and a Technical Writing certificate. She also got a certificate in Music from the University of San Francisco. Cecilia’s husband died in 1943, so she held many jobs to support her 2 children and widowed mother.

A dozen years ago, in 1951, Cecilia saw an advertisement for a “Girl Friday” at what turned out to be the start up of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. She works with Ernest Lawrence himself, as well as lab manager Sid Fernbach and that wicked Edward Teller. Did you know that Dr. Teller made Oppie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lose his security clearance? Over what, some crazy accusation that this great man was a communist? What a terrible thing. At any rate, this California laboratory was set up to provide competition to the nuclear weapon design we are doing at Los Alamos, and sometimes we have strong feelings about what they are doing out there.

Cecilia and asked for more training to become oriented toward the work of the lab, so she was placed in an internship at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. There she learned about the organization by working in several departments, including the Tool and Machine Shop. She later also helped set up the Laboratory’s Technical Information Department, a library of all of the classified documents that Dr. Teller and his team needed to use. Sounds so like what Charlotte Serber did at Los Alamos library!


Univac computer, showing various peripherals including a Unityper.(Image courtesy Computer History Museum)

Cecilia also got to travel to Philadelphia with the engineers to learn how to use their very first computer, the Univac LARC. The LARC came out before the IBM Stretch, but after the IBM 7090. Back at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Cecilia led the team of women that created the magnetic data tapes for the Univac on this cumbersome machine called a Unityper. Since your typing directly went onto magnetic tape, the work absolutely had to be correct, or you would have to start over. They would have two tapes made by different gals, and then compare them to see if they were the same. And they better be the same, or else. What a crazy system.

When the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore got their PDP-1 it probably came with Spacewar! in memory. I hear that the engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation do that to test whether the computer was working once it is turned on at its new location. Since the Laboratory is a secure site, used to model nuclear tests, they aren’t too likely to have a lot of computer game play going on, or a lot of outright “hackers” like university computer sites are breeding.

All the young engineers depend on Cecilia at the Laboratory. She always remembers everything, she knows where everything is, and she is unflappable. She never loses her temper, and that is very important to all of the young guys who don’t know what they are doing there. Cecilia tells me that she didn’t see much play when she works during the day, but perhaps the younger and more audacious computer users pull out the paper tapes in the evenings when the administrators go home.

In any event, it makes sense, corresponding with all the other upheavals in our society today, that there is a new generation of computer experts coming of age who are very different from the buttoned-down white-shirt-and-tie fellows we see from IBM.  Who knows what they'll come up with next!


Spacewar! in action

(By the way, though there are currently few places you can play the world's first computer game, given my contacts, I think I can help you sneak in for a session or two.  Just head over here.  Tell them Ida sent you…)




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Science / Space Race

[July 4, 1963] Down Under to the Worlds of Men (Woomera, Part 2)

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by Ida Moya

There’s been some great (and terrible) science fiction writing in the journey last month. I so appreciate these reviews, which help me find interesting things to read, and bring me up to date on the preoccupations of science fiction authors. The illustrations from the magazines that The Traveler includes are so compelling in style and subject matter. I think that they are an under-appreciated art form that, perhaps, sometime in the future, could become appreciated and highly collectible.

A few months ago I wrote about my friend Mary Whitehead, who works as an Experimental Officer in Australia. She recently wrote me back with some corrections, that I will pass on to you, in order not to mar the historical record.

For example, I said that Mary lived at Woomera, which was not the case. I was conflating the rocket testing range with the place where most of the computing work got done. She actually lives near the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE), which is located in Salisbury, a small town about 15 miles north of the big city of Adelaide. Woomera Rocket Range is in the isolated outback another 300 miles north of that.

In 1949, Mary, who studied mathematics in college, got a job in the Bomb Ballistics Section of the WRE. At that time, Mary was the only professional woman at Salisbury. Her first work was to lead a team of female Computers. At first, they used mechanical calculators like the noisy Friden’s and then Marchant’s like we used at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.


Bomb Ballistics Group Computer Judith Ellis recording data with pencil and paper from film, in 1949. (Courtesy of Defense Science and Technology Group)

In 1956 British company Elliott Brothers developed a custom-designed digital computer called WREDAC (Weapons Research Establishment Digital Automatic Computer) for WRE; one of but four digital computers in Australia at that time. This was a very sophisticated vacuum tube machine, a one off made a few years later than the ENIAC-style MANIAC we used at Los Alamos. In 1960 the WRE acquired the modular, somewhat mass-produced IBM 7090 mainframe computer, which is so valuable that they run it constantly, in three shifts.

Mary and some of her crew do go every once in a while to stay for a week at Woomera Village, next to the test range. She insisted that the Computers be able to observe the actual launches of rockets and missiles, and be trained in the operation of the data collection equipment — kinetheodolites, high-speed cine-cameras, radars, radio missile tracking systems, Doppler and telemetry reception equipment — in order to better interpret the results when they get back to Salisbury.


Two Computers wearing their army gear operate a kinetheodolite at Woomera around 1949.

Early on, it was quite a battle with the Range Superintendent to get her team to Woomera. He was concerned that it was an unsuitable and morally dangerous place for unattached young women. The compromise was that the women wear army gear – hat, khaki shirt and slacks, heavy brogues and leather jerkins for cold weather.


A team of computers visiting Woomera in 1950, wearing the army dress required by the Range Superintendent. Experimental Officer Mary Whitehead, Chaperone for the group, is second from the left. (Courtesy of Defense Science and Technology Group)

Back then, Woomera also did not have facilities for women, so they returned early from the range to have their showers from 4 to 5, before the men returned. The female Calculators also ate in the Officer’s Mess, so that they did not have to consort with the rougher men in the Other Ranks Mess. Today, though, the women working at Woomera have their own hostel and mess and no longer have to wear that army gear.

One part of Woomera range is a row of carefully calibrated cameras that take a series of photographs of a test launch. Her team also calibrates the cameras, which involves taking photographs of the starfield and getting the framing exactly right; a project that can take several weeks. Once calibrated, the tests commence and the launch photographs go back to the analysts, who use an overhead projector and other specialized equipment to translate each piece of film into location and time data. It’s really an amazingly detailed process involving a lot of cooperation. Now, what once took her team 4 weeks to calculate using Marchants, can be done in just a day on the IBM.


Long range Baker-Nunn camera for tracking satellites and photographing rockets, Woomera

Another mistake in my article that Mary pointed out to me was that she had never visited Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. When she visited America, she went to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to get a better star catalogue. She also went to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, and then the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Washington State, where she consulted with some men who had devised the mathematics for using stars as background markers for measuring the trajectories. Mary also went to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which must be where we met. She didn’t get to observe any missile tests at White Sands, but spoke with a man there who studies the refraction of light.

The project Mary is working on now is called Black Knight. It is a research ballistic missile, a test vehicle being used to get data to better design and build missiles, develop launch techniques, and learn how to handle such a big item. Mary’s group examines the Black Knight’s trajectory and re-entry into the atmosphere. So it’s important to get those measurements right, so these ballistic missiles can be better designed.


Blue Streak, one of many missiles tested at the Range, on its launcher at Lake Hart, Woomera, 1963

Mary, like me, is working for her government. In Australia and Britain, like the United States, there are careful bureaucracies that establish titles and pay rates. As a female Experimental Officer, Mary is paid the standard women’s rate of two-thirds of the male wage. Most of Mary’s female Computers are right out of school, and are expected to stay for only a few years, until they are married, when it is mandatory that they retire. Miss Mary Whitehead is not married, perhaps because of this system. Mary has even joined the Professional Officer’s Association to try to lobby for equal pay for equal work, but she is frustrated because the rest of the members are men so they don’t think too much of her appeals. Right now she trains new recruits, who start at the men’s base pay, which is more than she makes as an experienced officer. This Programmed Inequality that includes discarding of skilled Calculators and discouraging of skilled female technical workers is a great loss to the accuracy of this trajectory work in particular, and the development of computing technology in Australia and the United Kingdom in general.

I won’t tell you yet how much I make, but I too am stuck in a similarly unfair and enraging bureaucratic system. But, like me, Mary finds the work and constant learning so stimulating that it is almost worth it. Fortunately, the national push for equal rights among the races and sexes is beginning to change this awful standard. The 1960s is opening with turbulence; some people agitating for change, while other forces oppose this change, as the Traveler keeps pointing out. It’s a confusing time and hard to know what is real anymore. Perhaps a little science fiction and fantasy will ease this pain, and give us some insight into the potentials that we can build into our tomorrows.




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Science / Space Race

[May 22, 1963] Beyond the Typewriter (IBM Computers and how they work)

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by Ida Moya

I was very impressed by this month’s paean to the IBM Selectric Typewriter by traveler Victoria Lucas. Her sensuous love of the very physicality of the thing really got to me. As I mentioned before, knowing how to type is what made me what I am today; I too used this panoply of ever-better equipment, so I really enjoyed her story. The IBM Selectric is an incredibly satisfying typewriter to operate.

The most intriguing part of Miss (Mrs.?) Lucas’ article was her closing question, “What are you going to do to steal my heart next, IBM?  For example, where is this computer thing going? Will it be the next love of my life?”

Answer: The computer will be the next love of your life. (Or maybe your master.)

My place of employ, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), is a frontrunner in adopting new computing technologies. I have worked in different capacities as LASL moved from calculating equipment that ran with hand-propelled gears and ratchet wheels, to things electrically controlled by mechanical switches, to those using electomechanical relays. (The IBM Selectric uses yet another kind of electromechanical switch, though since it is not properly a computer I won’t address it now.) The height of switching technology was until very recently vacuum tubes, which are now being by supplanted by transistors. Transistors, an amazing miniaturized technology, are much smaller than vacuum tubes, work faster, and don’t get as hot.

With computers, there are a lot of viewpoints from which one can focus. I think of computers more from the perspective of an operator: making software programs run on the computers, and producing and analyzing the results. Other people think about computer architecture — how does the data flow in and out of the computer, and what happens when the information is processed inside.

Here is a picture of one of the three vacuum tube-based IBM 704 computers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. One of my colleagues, a computer operator, is shown opening the front door of the IBM 729 tape drive. As you can see, no special protective gear is required, and she doesn’t even have to wear a hair net. This is from just a few years ago; the computers we have now are even faster and more sophisticated.

The way we get a program into the computer is to punch the program onto cards, then use the card reader (the low piece of equipment in the center of this photograph) to transfer the program onto magnetic tapes. From the tape, the program is read into the computer’s core memory.

Data – for example, parameters for an experimental design study for a thermonuclear warhead, something you want to calculate over and over again with different settings — is then punched onto another set of cards, and read directly into the core memory. The program is transferred yet another time, to the CPU, the Central Processing Unit. There, the program acts on each of the data points in the core as appropriate. The results are printed out onto greenbar paper by the printer, which is the rightmost piece of equipment.

IBM produced this nifty card to illustrate the wonderful equipment they have to punch, sort, and interpret the cards.

We even have this little slide rule, which managers use to calculate how long it will take for keypunch operators to do a job. This little rule is our master – woe betide you if you cannot keep up!

I’m not sure what computing establishment this picture below is from, but here are a bunch of gals using IBM 026 card punches, very much like here at LASL. It’s nice to have a job and be a part of something important. But this windowless room jam packed with keypunch operators is depressing. Imagine how loud it is in there for these women. (Mary Whitehead tells me that when they were using calculators Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury, Australia, they had carpeting in the room and egg crates lining the walls to attempt to absorb some of the sound. Not so lucky here.)


From Wikipedia

And heaven help them if they ever have to use that fire extinguisher. The cords on the floor look like a real trip hazard. However, most of these gal are just working for a year or two before they get married and become housewives, so it doesn’t pay to make the conditions any better. Me, even though my husband works at the Santa Fe Railroad, we don’t have that luxury. We both have to work in order to make ends meet and raise our wonderful children. I suspect more and more women are going to join the workforce permanently in the coming years, and these conditions will become a lot more humane for all of the future computer workers.

Another perspective from which to understand computing is the physical components inside the computer that come together to make a larger whole. For example this IBM Field Replaceable Unit (FRU), pictured below. On top of the unit are several vacuum tubes, while the rest of the contraption consists of resistors, diodes, and other discrete components. Electrons flow through this and, ingeniously, compute the Boolean logic of ands, ors, and nots.

I took this module as a souvenir from our IBM 704 system when it was decommissioned. Unlike the computers built as one unique unit, like say the one-off computers ENIAC or MANIAC, the 704 is constructed of a small number of modules. If a component in one of these modules goes bad, the individual module is removed and quickly replaced with a new module – then the computer works again. The bad module can be tested and repaired at a more leisurely pace.  These computers are expensive to own and run; keeping them “up” as much as possible, for all three shifts, is imperative.

The IBM 7030 Stretch was also designed with modularity in mind. Instead of tubes, the Stretch uses transistors, as you can see on this Standard Modular System (SMS) card below. This particular module, about the size of a playing card, is a “two-way AND,” a particular kind of Boolean logic gate. SMS cards were first developed for the Stretch, and are also used in the brand new IBM 7090, 1401, and other super-fast IBM computers and peripherals of today.

If you look closely at the transistors, which are the metal cans, you can see the Texas-shaped brand mark of Texas Instruments. This American company has learned how to mass-produce transistors. Inside this can is a teeny little piece of germanium crystal, a “semiconductor,” with some probes attached. (And by attached, I mean soldered together by women using binocular microscopes and steady hands, jammed together in another terrible windowless room). Manipulating and transforming the way electrons flow through these cans is, ultimately how the computer does our bidding. Interestingly, computer operators don’t need to know about this in detail; we can leave it to the expert computer engineers and technicians.

IBM is not the only company using a modular strategy. For example a few days ago the traveler showed a brand-new Siemens 3003 computer system. I don’t have a parts book for this German company, so I don’t know what this particular module does, but you can see in the picture below there are two silver can-shaped transistors, plus some other colored packages of components.


(Courtesy of The Living Computer Museum

So, Miss Lucas, there is plenty to love about computers. Don’t get stuck just being a typist, and join us in the transistorized revolution!

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Science / Space Race

[Mar. 30, 1963] Mercury waltzes Matilda (the tracking and research station at Woomera, Australia)

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by Ida Moya

I’m back from a whirlwind of helping the data analysts at Los Alamos get their FORTRAN formulas running on that balky old IBM Stretch computer. I can see why IBM only made 8 of these things. It is miraculous to have a computer that can fit into a single room, but this stretch (pardon the pun) in computing technology still averages only 17 hours uptime a day — and that’s also a stretch (no more, I promise).

When it breaks, this swarm of white-coated men in ties comes in and fusses around with it with a bunch of special tools, as well as the set of ALDs (Automated Logic Diagrams) that come with every IBM computer. The way those diagrams are produced and updated with punch cards and special line printers is an amazing story, but for another time.

Although we at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory can comfort ourselves that the Stretch is the fastest computer in the world, I’m still envious of the institutions that have the better-engineered IBM 7090 computers. These are being used for calculations for the exciting Mercury program.


IBM 7090 at the Weapons Research Establishment's headquarters at Salisbury, on the northern outskirts of Adelaide in South Australia.

The Mercury spaceships do not have a computer on board – computers are far too heavy – so for figuring out how to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere the astronauts rely on computations sent by radio from the pair of IBM 7090 computers at the Mercury Control Station at Cape Canaveral. It’s an incredible amount of faith to put in one site, so Mercury control has those two redundant IBM computers, plus another set of computers in New Jersey. A third computer gathering information from the flight is on the other side of the globe — in Adelaide processing tracking data collected at at Weapons Research Establishment in Woomera, Australia. There is also another control center at Muchea, in Western Australia.


Control room of the astronaut tracking station at Muchea in Western Australia, part of US Project Mercury

A lot of people haven’t heard of Woomera, so let me tell you a little bit about it. At Woomera, more is being done than track Mercury astronauts. This part's an open secret, but the Brits and the Aussies are working together there on testing (or doing “trials” as they say) on rockets, missiles, and even atomic weapons. That's why they built this testing range in the middle of nowhere, in the outback of Australia.


Woomera Research Establishment Officer’s mess

A few years ago we had a visit from Bill Boswell, the Woomera director, along with a team from Maths Services, and Mary Whitehead, the leader of the Planning and Data Analysis Group. They were visiting various computer installations at Point Mugu, White Sands, and Cape Canaveral. These are all larger-than life place-names, but they really just represent groups of men and women madly making observations, coding the photographs in a way the computer can understand, and using these results to steer the manned spaceships. Mary and I had time to talk about more prosaic things, like her new apartment (or “flat” as they call it down under) in Woomera village, and the troubles of living so far from civilization.


Mary’s new flat at Woomera

Woomera reminds me a lot of Los Alamos. It is a similar purpose-built town, isolated from the surrounding population by remoteness and security. Entire families live there, with houses, apartments, and schools for the kids. There are clubs and mess halls; a bowling alley and community grocery store. The store sells just canned and packaged food; if you want something fresh the closest produce is 50 miles away. The planners made a lot of efforts to plant trees, most of which failed. Honestly, it sounds awful to me. I love the "Land of Enchantment" (New Mexico), where things actually grow. The two science towns also have odd mixed populations – for Los Alamos, it is the influx of American and foreign scientists, local Hispanos, and the San Ildefonso tribe. In Woomera, it is the influx of British scientists, local Aussies, and the aboriginal people. Personally I think Los Alamos does a better job of integrating the native population.


Community store in Woomera

There’s something about space that is so exciting. Space has it all: exploration, discovery, danger, and destiny. There’s so much more to it than my dry work of computers, trajectory calculations, and strangely named groups that I am so mired in. That’s why I am so excited to find science fiction and Galactic Journey’s reviews, which is opening my mind to our real future in space that this work makes possible.




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Science / Space Race

[February 9, 1963] Do something about the weather… (The State of the Art in Computing)

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[If you live in Southern California, you can see the Journey LIVE at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, 2 p.m. on February 17!]


by Ida Moya

Let me take you on a little trip, one that starts in wartime and that ends with a peacetime enterprise that increasingly affects all of our lives.  One that I've had the good fortune to participate in (or, at least, on the edges of).  Who knows — you might end up an integral part of it, too!

I'll start with an important but little-known woman scientist, one who was not only representative of the kind of service women have provided for decades, but who was also pivotal in my development.

Charlotte Serber was the first librarian at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. She went to live there with her husband, Robert Serber, at the start of the secret project. Bob was a student of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppie, as we all called him, was the charismatic (and later tortured) leader of what we now call the Manhattan Project.


The Library at Los Alamos

I worked for Charlotte, who was the only female section leader of Project Y on The Hill. Like me, she didn’t start as a professional librarian. In fact, one of Charlotte’s first tasks was to organize the maids. Charlotte taught me a lot, and we all worked together to organize the printed materials, borrow scientific books from universities, subscribe to physics journals from all over the world, and endlessly mimeograph things. I didn’t think my hands would ever NOT be blue from that messy ink. We had the only mimeograph machine for a long time, so it seemed everybody would come by to make some copies and share the latest news.

Charlotte and Bob left Los Alamos after the bomb was dropped, but I stayed on. There were a lot of Hispanos like me on The Hill; my cousins and second cousins and of course my husband and family were living and working there too. When my husband moved us to The Hill and started working as a carpenter, they put out a call for wives who could type. That I can type and had the courage to answer that call saved me from what was seemingly my destiny on The Hill — being a maid, or at best, a store clerk. I’m grateful for Charlotte taking a chance on my younger self and letting this Hispano work more seriously on The Hill.

That was then, when computers were people or room-sized tube-packed monstrosities.  The world now is crazier than science fiction dreamed back then, in the middle of which my work has situated me. In fact, my unique position enables me to do research using the resources of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, our sister institution the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the libraries of our managing institution, the University of California. This puts me ahead of the curve in knowing about (and working on the computers involved with) cutting edge developments in science.

Take the weather, for example. The Traveler has recently written about the upcoming launch of the first Nimbus satellite, and the recent launches of three Tiros weather satellites. My interest piqued, I’ve lately been quizzing my colleagues in engineering about how weather prediction via satellite using computers actually works. Fair warning: I might tell you something that is classified, but I will try to keep the classified things secret.

Weather prediction via satellite does not just involve getting the object into space (a big task in itself); there is also a coordinated effort of redundant ground stations to collect the data sent from the satellites. Computers are far too huge and heavy to send into orbit, so the satellites transmit their findings to computers back on earth for further analysis. But what do these computers actually compute?

Predicting the weather has a long history, going back to Aristotle and before. In the modern age, Lewis Fry Richardson is considered the father of using computers to analyze the weather, based on his 1922 book, Weather prediction by numerical process. This book was written before transistorized or tube computers; he was thinking about men and women with electronic hand calculators like the Marchant we used before the IBM computers came to Los Alamos. One much cited quote is his thought experiment describing a “weather theatre” or “forecast factory”:

“After so much hard reasoning, may one play with fantasy? Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation.”


 
I love this little sketch; I’m not sure where it came from. It’s not in Richardson’s book, but it fits his vision. In his thought experiment, Richardson imagined 64,000 human computers, all calculating simultaneous equations for their part of the globe, their pace synchronized by the conductor in the center. Runners would go down the aisles collecting results from sectors where the conductor would shine a light, and take them to a central office to be collated. A crazy idea. Until now, when we have transistorized computers fast enough to potentially run and collate 64,000 calculations at a time.
 
These new computers, aside from calculating nuclear explosions (a thing we at Los Alamos are very familiar with) are being used for weather prediction. In the UK, a Ferranti Mercury computer, known as “Meteor,” was used starting January 1959 at the Met Office to do Numerical Weather Prediction. The Meteor is a vacuum tube computer. Those panels along the right are not just a fancy wall; those are the sides of the frames of the computer! Unlike the women in the bank HSBC wearing spike heels, these computer operators seem to be allowed more practical footwear.
 

 
A transistorized English Electric KDF9 “Comet” is slated to replace this Mercury in another year or so. This is the same type of computer used by HSBC to perform banking operations. All of that blue and silver receding into the background of this photo is the computer. The typewriter-looking thing on the right is used to get results from the computer, while the U-shaped things are high speed paper tape readers used to feed data into the computer. Getting information in and out of these things is turning out to be a limiting factor to their speed. That punched paper tape has to be rewound by hand; a careful task that must be done properly or it will kink and break. The tape is impossible to repair it once it has broken, so there is a lot of cursing and re-punching of tapes when that happens. Also, the tape moves so fast it is like a razor blade, giving the mother of all paper cuts to the incautious.


 
In America, weather prediction is being done at the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (consisting of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Weather Bureau. The JNWPU is on their 4th IBM computer, having already used the IBM 701 and IBM 704 (both vacuum tube computers). They then used an IBM 1401 transistorized computer with a high speed paper tape reader. The national weather service then got one of the very first IBM 7090 computers. Each of these computers was about 6 times faster than the one before.
 
The photographs sent from the Tiros satellites is sent in triplicate to Command and Data Acquisition stations in DC and Hawaii. There humans use physical tools, drafting tables and scales, to hand plot the movement of the clouds onto maps. These coordinates are then sent to the NASA Computing Center and the U. S. Weather Bureau, where they are then fed into the computers (using that terrible punched paper tape). The computers use complex mathematical formulas to predict the future movement of the clouds and therefore predict the weather. The output is automatically printed on wide paper by a typewriter-like thing, a Friden Flexowriter. This whole process is managed by teams of technicians, men and women. When it is ready, the printout goes to engineers who study the results.


 
As you can see, the glory is really all on the ground.  To all of you who want to be astronauts, perhaps you might think about the many people who support their flight…and aspire to be one of them instead.

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Your ballot should have arrived by now…]




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Science / Space Race

[January 7, 1963] From Los Alamos to the Moon (Computing — the State of the Art)

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by Ida Moya

[Meet our newest fellow Journeyer, Mrs. Moya, whose technical background is as enviable as it is fascinating.  Given the whirlwind pace at which computer technology is advancing, I thought our readers would like to get, straight from the source (as it were), an account of Where We Are Today…]

Hello, fellow Travelers. My journey to date has been both a long and short one. Long in that I've come a long way since I first started as a typist at an institution you might have heard of: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.  And short in the fact that, well, I'm still here, now employed in the Lab's technical library. I’ve been around these New Mexico labs for nearly twenty years, since they built the first atomic bombs which ended the war.
 
I started at Los Alamos as a typist, creating memos and reports for the scientists. I learned how to type in high school, a skill that has taken me a long way. I was on the Hill in the beginning, in 1943, when there were only a couple of hundred people were working there. By 1945, there were over 6000. I’ve done a lot of things in these twenty dusty years at Los Alamos. Most of my work has been in the library, helping the scientists and engineers find the documents and information they need in order to get their work done. I’ve seen a lot over these years, and learned quite a bit about science and computers to better help the scientists get things done.

I can tell you more about Los Alamos and Project Y, which until now have been the hush-hushiest of subjects, because just this year a book came out — Volume 1 of the History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: The New World 1939-1946.

This blockbuster new report, designed by esteemed colleague Marilyn Shobaken of Penn State, where it was published, has all the science archives in New Mexico and beyond buzzing. She was so involved with the production of this document that her name is even included on the verso, right after the Library of Congress catalog card number 62-14633.
 
That's just background. I promise I will tell you more stories of Project Y and the Hill later, but for now, let me tell you about my current work.  It involves the development of computation and how these new transistorized computers will take us into space. I’m not flying into space myself, but the work I do is helping those brave men get to the moon. This is an incredibly exciting project to be a part of, and I’m glad that NASA is not secret. So let me tell you about some of the competitive scientific and technical developments that Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory is leading.
 
Just last month, on December 7, 1962, the University of Manchester in the UK commissioned the Atlas computer, said to be faster than even the newest IBM computers — the Stretch, the 7090, and the 7094. However, one thing the Atlas computer doesn’t have is an industry behind it. Manchester made this one experimental machine, and have two others in the works; that’s it.

At Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, we acquired the first IBM Stretch computer in 1961. This new transistorized computer was supposed to be 100 times faster than IBM’s previous vacuum-tube based computer, the IBM 704. The Stretch turned out to be only about 35 times faster, so IBM considers it a failure.

Still, the Stretch is faster than the gals in the human computer facilities, pecking away on their baby-blue Marchant electromechanical calculators. I did this for a time before we got our electronic computers; a tiring and thankless job that had to be done accurately in makeshift buildings in the high desert. Now we program our computers in FORTRAN, in air-conditioned rooms. If you have the aptitude, I highly recommend you learn to program computers using this innovative formula translating language. The space race needs more capable computer programmers (and it's not just for women, no matter what the engineers might tell you).

IBM made a few more Stretch computers, all for governmental customers. The National Security Agency has just installed the next one, and others are being prepared for our sister project at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, as well as the Atomic Weapons Establishment in England, and the US National Weather Service. That's about it, though. As I said, IBM deems this marvel a failure.

However, IBM has learned from this exercise, and has turned their considerable manufacturing prowess to the IBM 7090 and IBM 7094 computers. IBM has factories churning these out by the dozen. As I write, two IBM 7090 computers are installed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, calculating trajectories for NASA’s Mercury program. These 7090 computers are also being used by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to simulate flight trajectories in aid of the design of the Saturn rocket system, the rocket that is going to take Americans to the moon. Four more IBM 7090 computers are being used by the Air Force for their Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. There is even an IBM 7090 installed at the Woomera Long Range Weapons Establishment, as part of the Anglo-Australian Joint Project, also used to calculate rocket and missile trajectories. America’s industries are not far behind; two more IBM 7090 systems are being used by American Airlines for their forward-thinking SABRE flight reservation system. Imagine, soon even regular people like us will be able to experience the glamour and sophistication of air travel, as new jet and computer technologies put the price of a ticket within affordable reach.

So, Manchester U.K. may have the “fastest” computer in the Atlas, but the United States has the lead in building an entire industrial infrastructure to deploy fast computers all over the country and free world. Healthy competition with our allies is fine, but what we really need to do is win the space race against those godless Russian communists. The American people will prevail in space, in no small part thanks to FORTRAN and IBM computers.

I'm proud to be a part of this adventure, and now, as part of the Journey, I look forward to bringing you along with me!

—

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Check your mail for instructions…]




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