9 ms·

In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience i

by a3n 5y ago

In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper forms. Green see-through plastic letter guides. Whiteout. Lots of whiteout. We had access to a department mini computer, don't remember what it was. The language might have been Basic-like, but I didn't know enough to recognize it as such. I figured out how to write and run programs, someone showed me how to print, and I wrote a program that would accept values for all a form's fundamental values, and cascade those through calculations for the dependent values, and print out the filled in form. You could save it, update a new value, re-cascade, and print it out again. No more whiteout. Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. The system administer noticed more load when people ran my program. He found me, and told me not to do that again. I learned that there was a thing called a system administrator. He might have given me a better canned sort, don't remember. I eventually thought it would be a good idea to quit and go to school, so I did. (I took a number theory class, but had to drop it. I don't have the math nature.)

WalterBright 5y ago
In the same time frame, I worked at Boeing doing design work on the 757. I didn't know how to do complex numbers using drafting tools, but I knew how to use a computer. The only computer in the building was an '11 in a special locked room with raised floor and A/C. It was under the control of Boeing Computer Services, a totally separate division from Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, which I worked for. Anyhow, I befriended the sysadmin and he on the sly gave me an account and the code for the door. I wrote a bunch of numerical integration matrix programs, and showed the results to my lead, who told me computer results were all bullshit (he'd gotten bad numbers from them before) and called over his best draftsman, and told him to show me up (all in a friendly way, he was a great fellow). The draftsman worked for two days, and came up with a sheet full of numbers to 3 significant digits. Mine were to 6. We compared, and one was wrong. He said my number was wrong. I knew it wasn't, because continuous functions don't have anomalous behavior. He good naturedly agreed to redo that one, and in a while came back and said my numbers were right. After that, my lead trusted my work, and I got all the math work in his group. Eventually, some manager in BCS discovered I was making unauthorized use of the '11, and went several management levels over my head to demand I be censured. My lead (one of the engineering treasures at Boeing) went to bat for me. That went many levels up, and the BCS manager got a smackdown and was ordered to legitimize my usage. In another incident, I got the job of writing some test plan specifications. The usual technique was to hand write them and hand them off to the secretary pool to type up. I get writer's cramps after handwriting 5 or 6 words. The secretary pool was in a special doored room full of Wang word processors. All women, and the supervisor was a woman. I asked for access to a Wang, as it was faster for me to type than hand write. She said ok, but I'd have to take the 2 week Wang course first. I asked if I could just have a look at the manual. She laughed and said sure. She was sure I'd fail. I looked through it for a few moments, fired up the Wang and started editing. It was, after all, just a text editor. The supervisor was annoyed, but she kept her word. If I'd stayed at Boeing I'd have likely been the first engineer to bring in my own PC for my desk, at my own expense.
- a3n 5y ago
  > In the same time frame, I worked at Boeing doing design work on the 757. After I graduated I worked at Boeing in a test group, and wrote control software for test rigs, mainly to test Fuel Quantity Indicating Systems on the 57 and 67, 47-400, and 77. That was in Les Carpenter's group, and they still had some test rigs lying around built with relays mounted on wooden boards.
  - bane 5y ago
    I just came to say I'm really enjoying this trip down memory road. Please keep the great stories coming!
- eitland 5y ago
  A friend of mine did something similar, although in a tax office. Ploughed through weeks of works in days (he is really fast at typing too). When he came back with his work the manager of course wouldn't belive him, set two men to verify it for weeks and they concluded it wasn't only correct but even had less errors. After that he was "promoted" to a customer facing job (since he was "unqualified" to program). My dad told me this story when I was a kid. It's how I ended up as a developer and why I still am. Delighting customer by making weeks of boring work vanish into empty air is still fantastic. Edit: I've been luckier than him. It is not always that people can be helped but I was never punished.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  > hand them off to the secretary pool to type up This brought back a memory. In the late 80s I got a job at a very high-tech science and engineering firm. A colleague told me to be careful about writing code. His supervisor had walked by his office one day and saw him writing code on a terminal. He chewed him out for "typing" because "typing is for secretaries." Apparently the correct procedure was to hand-write your code onto a paper form and hand it to a secretary for entry into the computer. I assumed my colleague was joking but checked out the official procedure and it was true. After that, I shut my door when I wrote code.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mxcrossb 5y ago
Great story. I wonder if somewhere on a site like the daily wtf you can find the sys admin’s retelling where he relays in horror how a bubble sort almost brought down the system!
yumraj 5y ago
And now you’re a semi truck driver.. how did that happen from soft developer to semi truck driver?
- a3n 5y ago
  Anger and poor impulse control led me to rage quit a job. And I wasn't the best developer. I don't think any job was ever sorry to see me go.
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    How do you deal with idiot drivers though?
    - a3n 5y ago
      I put my finger on the protective cover over the laser turret switch, and usually that's enough. I've never actually lifted the cover.
kqr 5y ago
It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that. People's natural mental sorting algorithm is most often insertion sort. That's what you use when you hold a hand of playing cards, for example. Sometimes something else (radix sort with monopoly money, for example), but I've never seen anyone invent bubble sort without first being told about it one way or another. (Which is a good thing because bubble sort is just such a stupid idea I don't know why we teach it. In my life, I've only ever been notified of one single good use case for it: you need to slowly converge on an order but the minimum amount of computation is necessary for each step of the convergence.)
- jacobolus 5y ago
  https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubble-sorts-comeback.html https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubb...
  - kqr 5y ago
    I did not expect that, but sure enough, makes sense when I look at it. Thanks!
- gsliepen 5y ago
  > I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that. I taught a C programming class for first-year students for a few years at the end of the 90s, where one of the tasks was to sort an array of words, with no hints given as to what kind of algorithm they should implement. Most students came up with bubble sort. Insertion sort was much less prevalent, and the few students who did typically did a kind of out-of-place insertion sort. (I also saw a O(N^4) algorithm once.)

by a3n 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

In the same time frame, I worked at Boeing doing design work on the 757. I didn't know how to do complex numbers using drafting tools, but I knew how to use a computer. The only computer in the building was an '11 in a special locked room with raised floor and A/C. It was under the control of Boeing Computer Services, a totally separate division from Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, which I worked for. Anyhow, I befriended the sysadmin and he on the sly gave me an account and the code for the door. I wrote a bunch of numerical integration matrix programs, and showed the results to my lead, who told me computer results were all bullshit (he'd gotten bad numbers from them before) and called over his best draftsman, and told him to show me up (all in a friendly way, he was a great fellow). The draftsman worked for two days, and came up with a sheet full of numbers to 3 significant digits. Mine were to 6. We compared, and one was wrong. He said my number was wrong. I knew it wasn't, because continuous functions don't have anomalous behavior. He good naturedly agreed to redo that one, and in a while came back and said my numbers were right. After that, my lead trusted my work, and I got all the math work in his group. Eventually, some manager in BCS discovered I was making unauthorized use of the '11, and went several management levels over my head to demand I be censured. My lead (one of the engineering treasures at Boeing) went to bat for me. That went many levels up, and the BCS manager got a smackdown and was ordered to legitimize my usage. In another incident, I got the job of writing some test plan specifications. The usual technique was to hand write them and hand them off to the secretary pool to type up. I get writer's cramps after handwriting 5 or 6 words. The secretary pool was in a special doored room full of Wang word processors. All women, and the supervisor was a woman. I asked for access to a Wang, as it was faster for me to type than hand write. She said ok, but I'd have to take the 2 week Wang course first. I asked if I could just have a look at the manual. She laughed and said sure. She was sure I'd fail. I looked through it for a few moments, fired up the Wang and started editing. It was, after all, just a text editor. The supervisor was annoyed, but she kept her word. If I'd stayed at Boeing I'd have likely been the first engineer to bring in my own PC for my desk, at my own expense.

a3n 5y ago
> In the same time frame, I worked at Boeing doing design work on the 757. After I graduated I worked at Boeing in a test group, and wrote control software for test rigs, mainly to test Fuel Quantity Indicating Systems on the 57 and 67, 47-400, and 77. That was in Les Carpenter's group, and they still had some test rigs lying around built with relays mounted on wooden boards.
- bane 5y ago
  I just came to say I'm really enjoying this trip down memory road. Please keep the great stories coming!
eitland 5y ago
A friend of mine did something similar, although in a tax office. Ploughed through weeks of works in days (he is really fast at typing too). When he came back with his work the manager of course wouldn't belive him, set two men to verify it for weeks and they concluded it wasn't only correct but even had less errors. After that he was "promoted" to a customer facing job (since he was "unqualified" to program). My dad told me this story when I was a kid. It's how I ended up as a developer and why I still am. Delighting customer by making weeks of boring work vanish into empty air is still fantastic. Edit: I've been luckier than him. It is not always that people can be helped but I was never punished.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
> hand them off to the secretary pool to type up This brought back a memory. In the late 80s I got a job at a very high-tech science and engineering firm. A colleague told me to be careful about writing code. His supervisor had walked by his office one day and saw him writing code on a terminal. He chewed him out for "typing" because "typing is for secretaries." Apparently the correct procedure was to hand-write your code onto a paper form and hand it to a secretary for entry into the computer. I assumed my colleague was joking but checked out the official procedure and it was true. After that, I shut my door when I wrote code.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mxcrossb 5y ago

Great story. I wonder if somewhere on a site like the daily wtf you can find the sys admin’s retelling where he relays in horror how a bubble sort almost brought down the system!

yumraj 5y ago

And now you’re a semi truck driver.. how did that happen from soft developer to semi truck driver?

a3n 5y ago
Anger and poor impulse control led me to rage quit a job. And I wasn't the best developer. I don't think any job was ever sorry to see me go.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  How do you deal with idiot drivers though?
  - a3n 5y ago
    I put my finger on the protective cover over the laser turret switch, and usually that's enough. I've never actually lifted the cover.

kqr 5y ago

It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that. People's natural mental sorting algorithm is most often insertion sort. That's what you use when you hold a hand of playing cards, for example. Sometimes something else (radix sort with monopoly money, for example), but I've never seen anyone invent bubble sort without first being told about it one way or another. (Which is a good thing because bubble sort is just such a stupid idea I don't know why we teach it. In my life, I've only ever been notified of one single good use case for it: you need to slowly converge on an order but the minimum amount of computation is necessary for each step of the convergence.)

jacobolus 5y ago
https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubble-sorts-comeback.html https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubb...
- kqr 5y ago
  I did not expect that, but sure enough, makes sense when I look at it. Thanks!
gsliepen 5y ago
> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that. I taught a C programming class for first-year students for a few years at the end of the 90s, where one of the tasks was to sort an array of words, with no hints given as to what kind of algorithm they should implement. Most students came up with bubble sort. Insertion sort was much less prevalent, and the few students who did typically did a kind of out-of-place insertion sort. (I also saw a O(N^4) algorithm once.)