The year was 1970, and I was a Junior Engineer at the Special Products Division of Ampex Corporation in Redwood City California. I had applied for a job as a technician after dropping out of Berkeley in a depressive crash, but with my work experience while in school I was routed to a job that was sort of a combination of technician and engineer.
Special Products, as its name implies, was the place where oddball jobs came to be done. We had to be able to design and build almost anything, and the division was tiny by Ampex standards. I learned the craft of engineering there, and consider myself quite lucky to have wound up there.
In 1970 we were building the "Pyramid System" - a contrived acronym referring to a system for delivering illustrated audio lectures on a college campus and allowing the lectures to take various branches in response to the students' responses on a numeric keypad. Today it could be handled by a DVD player with a keyboard, but then it required racks ands racks of equipment installed in a basement room and wired to multiple locations around campus.
A system like that had to be controlled by a computer, and we were using the Data General Nova 1200 - a box with maybe 16K of 32-bit magnetic core memory, a panel with switches and lights and a number of connectors on the back. One of those connectors was the "I/O bus" - the means by which external electronic equipment could be placed under control of the computer. The architecture of the Nova I now consider to be rather inferior for reasons I won't go into here - back then I knew no better. I was placed in charge of "maintaining" the design of the external interface electronics - a job no one else wanted.
We had a demo room in our building - the largest conference room available in which the system was being staged. Our software guys worked in there putting together the machine code that would make everything run. They used a Teletype Model 33 as a terminal, connected by another plug to the back of the Nova.
When prospective customers came to visit they were first received in a front conference room and told the wonders they would behold. Then our engineering manager, Maynard Kuljian, would conduct them back through the doorway labeled "Engineering" to the demo room. Far too often the system would crash as soon as they entered the room. I remember Ray, one of the software engineers, softly crying out "Wha' hoppen'?" as the disaster struck, as always at the worst possible time. Maynard would have to take the visitors back out and entertain them for another half hour while Ray and others scrambled to re-load the software. I would retreat to my desk out in the bull pen and try to stay busy.
Eventually Maynard made a hard decision. He would not go back to the demo room with the clients, but would send them in someone else's charge. Somehow, he figured, he was the cause of the crashes. And apparently it worked! The crashes ceased!
That was engineering at work. In a process far older than science, one takes a guess as to what might work and tries it. The question of "why" is irrelevant (though possibly useful) - the operative question is "how". If the "why" is supernatural, that's fine, as long as the effect is consistent for as long as it's needed. And it was.
For two years I worked on that system, while Ampex began a long, slow process of contraction. Six years later I sought out Maynard and tried to recruit him to be engineering manager of the personal computer company I was helping. He turned me down - he was much happier, he said, working on building products than on the management track.
So when you look at engineers at work, don't think that they are all so very smart. Sometimes they're just foolhardy - and lucky. But you'll never know when that is.
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