COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 27

MORNING TEST MESSAGE
Each morning we sent a test message over the computer-to-teletype network at Rocketdyne. We tried to make that message useful, interesting, or perhaps argumentative. One that I thought-up and remember is: “People complain about the idle-rich, and the idle-poor. The one because they are idle, the other because they are rich.”

PRODUCTION CONTROL MEETING
About this time I attended a convention in Los Angeles on Aerospace production control systems, using IBM equipment. I was surprised, more than a little disappointed, and partially proud, that when the representatives from Chance Vought presented their project, the printed reports, the procedures, the punch cards, and the flow charts, were still almost exactly as I had designed them several years earlier. About all that had changed, was the color of some paper items. It may have been good when invented, but years had passed, and improvements were overdue. What I was doing at that time at Rocketdyne, was well advanced over that earlier procedure.

The fact that I had worked on the assembly line in the factory, had stocked the parts bins, and had repaired failed engines, was invaluable for my work in applying IBM machines to the production control systems. No one else in the office had any idea what went on in the factory, no one in the factory had any idea what IBM machines could do.

If I was so smart, why ain’t I rich? Well, I was smart in production control procedures, and in IBM equipment, but at least partly because I had almost no formal education, I was completely in the dark as to how to strong-arm my way to better things, using those abilities. The fact that I “retired” from the computer business after about 30 years, at age 50, had little to do with computers, but resulted from apartment building prices soaring when caught in Jimmy Carter’s inflation, in the mid to late 1970s.

Well, come to think of it, the money to buy the apartment buildings in the first place, came from my efforts in the computer industry.