COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 59

INFORMATICS
Next I worked at Informatics Inc., a software Company, where I sold programming and consulting services. My daughter Linda worked here a few years later. The company had been founded a few years earlier, by people who I knew, at least a little. While at RCA I needed the help of a software consultant, so hired people from Informatics, who I already knew. Informatics had an arrangement with, and was doing most or all of their work for Data Products, and I think the contract with RCA was their first “outside” contract.

After a couple of years the Vice President who hired me at Informatics, was transferred to another job. The new Vice President brought in “his” people from his last job, and I was out of a job. A few years later I was told that after two years, when that VP and his people were fired, he and his crew had sold less dollars worth of contracts than I had sold in the couple of years I worked alone.

THE STANFORD LINEAR ACCELERATOR
I made sales calls (trying to sell software and programming services) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), (in which the paths of the particles accelerated are essentially straight lines rather than circles) near Stanford University in Palo Alto and had no more idea what was going on, then I had when I visited Brookhaven National Laboratory, years earlier. Interstate 280 crosses over the mile-or-so-long Linear Accelerator that is sort of like a cyclotron, except it is straight, rather than a circle. It’s a mile or so long, and since it had to be exactly level and straight, it was constructed with a little upward curve to compensate for the curvature of the Earth! (It’s not that I am keeping all this a secret, I just don’t understand it that well.)