General Electric Co.
Missile And Space Division
The start of my fifty years of experience in the computer industry was here, in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I worked here the longest of any place in my professional career, from February of 1967 until June of 1977. I began as a Mathematics Technician, responsible for providing assistance to Aerospace Engineers who were developing heat-protection mechanisms to assure the safe delivery of thermonuclear weapons. But I can't talk about any of that, it was all classified. What I did was spend countless hours examining stacks of computer output. I would follow the course of numbers that were the result of hours of calculations, and plot the results on graph paper, so the engineers could tell if they were doing the right thing. After some time, I learned to use the computers myself, and found out I could turn the stacks of printed output directly into charts and graphs using different equipment, and as a result of my labor-saving ideas,
I was awarded a "Zero-Defects" plaque.
At a later stage in my career there, the lab I worked for was known as the "Oceanographic & Environmental Sciences Lab," and I worked on a project to obtain long-term temperature fluctuations in the deep ocean. This involved the deployment of an instrumented buoy over 80 ft. long in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. I was responsible for the data-acquisition, which was done on a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer (with all of 8K RAM!) The computer was housed in an old van parked at the Navy base on the island, and I had to go down to install it, and later to replace a failed subsystem board.
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