appreciate

Seattle and the University of Washington
Systems Programming for that B5500
Locally, it was only Dick Hamlet and myself there to take care of the B5500. Dick
is a very astute computer person. He is a tall, sandy-haired, bushy-faced guy with
freckles and piercing eyes. He did not tolerate incompetence whether it be intellectual
or otherwise, but rewarded you with a smile when you sparked his interest.
He understood the B5500 Operating System like no one I ever knew, and he gave a
lecture to the new Computer Science Group at the UW where he described the
thickness of a listing as a measure of the complexity of an operating system. I never
forgot that line, because it was so often true. I always used that measure to determine
the output of my own engineers in later years.
I learned much from the architecture of the B5500 computer. In particular, I learned
about data structures for organizing disk drive information.
In later years, I extrapolated from these B5500 data structures to create the first personal
computer operating system, which I named CP/M.
The Age of Timesharing
There was a new technology in the works. It was called Remote Access. At the UW,
we used a data communications setup attached to the B5500. Only the privileged
Oracles could hook up. There were eight ports tied to the B5500.
Dick Hamlet had a direct connection to the B5500 from his office, which I coveted
dearly. There was another in the computer room. Some officials had the others, and
I was never allowed entry there. But, they never used the lines, so it didn't matter
anyway.
A modem was connected to a third port. I got the university to buy a portable
acoustic coupled modem for me. This let me make a phone call to the B5500. "Big
deal," you say, "I do this every day using my 2400 baud built-in modem, connected
to Compuserve, Prodigy, Dow-Jones, and places that I don't even know I'm connected
to .... "
Cut me some slack. Hey, that was almost thirty years ago. This acoustic coupler, or
"modem" as we call it today, was grey, and about the size of a shoe box with two
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Computer Connections