A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[Conrad]

Those were days when men were men and computers were computers.

I was one of those men in 1976. . .

I had written a FORTRAN program for "blowing" a wood chip Digester after the cooking was done. The idea was that the Dump Flow Rate would remain constant during the changing static head on the Blow Valve. Of course a piece of cake for me. . .a long piece of cake! As the pressure in the vessel dropped some water flashed into steam and the evaporative heat extraction would cool everything in the digester down and the pressure would drop lower yet. . .the thermodynamics of this had to be calculated in order to drive the Blow Control Valve open just the right way, till the digester was empty.

The handwritten FORTRAN code to calculate the pressure on the valve had to be send to some distant computer via a tele-type terminal and I got a heap of ticker tape with holes in it to represent my effort. Half a week later at best I got the FORTRAN code print-out on which we could check the typing errors and make changes to the program we had decided on in the meantime. . .and that had to be repeated several times. The hard data storage medium was a yellow roll of paper tape!

Those were the days when Greenhorns just out of school became men! We Greenhorns drove the companies into the Computer Age. The only computer I had ever seen that time was the IBM main frame in the basement of the University, in 1974. . .we used the Hollorith punch-cards there to “talk” to the computer. . .it was protected as if it was Fort Knocks!