COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 30

COMPUTERIZED WAR GAME
Fort Huachuca, next door to the Mexican Border and Sierra Vista, Arizona, south of Tucson, was an old US Army base, most recently used during WW II as a training base for Black soldiers. It had been closed for years, until the Signal Corp. decided they needed an isolated place to test communications equipment, and if this was anything, it was isolated. With a strong “tailwind,” residents of Sierra Vista could get a very few TV stations for entertainment. About the largest building in town was the ruin of the nightclub that had been operated by the fighter, Joe Louis, during WW II.

By the time we moved to Sierra Vista to work for CEIR, the Army had built new buildings on the Fort, and had installed an IBM 709 Computer in the headquarters building. It had the equivalent of 196,000 characters of memory.

To be a little more exact, the memory wasn’t organized in characters. There were actually 32,768 “words” of 36 binary bits each, plus a couple other bits that shall remain anonymous. Since in those days we used 6 bits to make an alphanumerical character (an IBM term, I think), it could hold about 196,000 characters. That was considered a lot, in those days. This memory cost many thousands of dollars rent each month. Each day the engineers spent hours just keeping it all working.

There were also four buffered input/output channels, and maybe 15 or 20 magnetic tapes. It was about the biggest computer available on the general market, in those days.

The programs, mostly written in FORTRAN (a then well known computer software program, named Formula Translator), were being prepared by a few civilians, and several soldiers. In the 1960s, not many people knew what a computer was, or how to use it, so these soldiers were really lucky to be learning a trade that would be so useful. A minor rebellion was barely sidestepped when a Private, who was discharged after his enlistment term, was offered a job with our company at a higher salary than some of the Army officers he had recently reported to, and now worked “with”!