Yes to the editing! The Xerox I learned PL/C on was a Xerox 530, a midrange that my dad bought for the nascent Arts Computing Office at University of Waterloo, which he was creating to bring computing to the Arts faculty. At the time, UofW had a 360/75 and a /44, but those were in the Math building and inaccessible to Artsies.
He had started in computing in the 50s working on machine translation for The Government (read: CIA), a failed project that led into another failed project to do the same thing at IBM Yorktown in the 60s. At CIA, he was the linguist, and would tell a programmer what he wanted a program to do; the programmer would write it out on autocoder sheets, give it to a keypunch operator, and a day later he'd find out that it didn't work. He figured out that if he could learn to write the programs, it'd be faster and easier, so he did. That led into creating concordances, first of Beowulf (there's a throwaway line in Annie Hall, "Just don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf", which my family finds inordinately humorous, since we lived with that book for *years* during this project) and then of various other things, including Freud and Virginia Wolff. By the mid-70s he was at UofW, teaching linguistics, and creating the ACO. Xerox had a big campaign pushing the 500 series, with a slogan along the lines of "We're Xerox, we'll always be there for you!". The ACO bought the 530, and the next year Xerox sold their Data Systems Division to Honeywell, who promptly killed the line (well, supported for a few years, but clearly dying). A decade or so later, Xerox briefly got into the PC compatible business--with the same slogan. My dad just laughed: he knew how that would go (and it did)! Anyway, I got to sit in on his PL/C class the summer after 8th grade, which was kind of a big deal back then--none of my friends had ever touched a computer; one of them asked what its voice sounded like! Clearly too much Star Trek. When I worked at UofW from 80-86 I used to help out with his Introduction to Computing for Arts Students, who were a LOT better-looking than their Math and CS compatriots. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Cairns <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 15, 2022 3:06 PM To: [email protected]; Phil Smith III <[email protected]> Subject: Re: "The Computers Nobody Wanted" That's a brilliant read, thanks for posting. Amazing to see the perspective of an early CIO in action considering the S360 offerings against their competitors as things looked to them at the time. And also a brilliant exposition of what really happened at Xerox from someone with a seat at the table, together with some harsh and true insights into the preference for Marketing over Data in CxO level discussions that has prevailed in corporate boardrooms for far too long now. References to BBN and J.C.R. Licklider are consummately covered also in one of my favourite books about this era, Where Wizards Stay Up Late https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674. He could do with an editor and proof reader though. Cheers - Mike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
