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I joined as a contractor, not an employee, to
handle the UNIX support desk in the Holmdel Laboratory. Bell Labs was a part of
AT&T, one of the largest, wealthiest companies in the world. Holmdel, one
of many Bell Labs locations, was a glass-enclosed 6-story building with about
6,000 employees. It was an incredible place to work. In that building, one
could find a noted Ph.D. expert on anything you needed help with. It was an
honor and privilege to be part of such a dynamic, exciting environment. I got
an ego boost every time I entered the building.
The Holmdel lab had an immense IBM computer
center for their scientific work. UNIX systems were coming in for
documentation and publishing. They were just starting to be used for scientific
and engineering work. The computer center hired me for the UNIX hotline phone
support. I would answer questions and consult with individual projects trying
to integrate UNIX into their operations. They chose me to be the C language
counselor for the whole corporation to relieve the C development team at Murray
Hill.
The chart shows the evolution of UNIX from
its very beginning on the PDP-7. I worked on the PDP-7 at the University of
Illinois and based my Master’s thesis on it (assembly
language raw—no operating system or interrupts). In my career at Bell Labs, I
worked in systems programming, driver development, and applications programming
on most of the variations shown, including UNIX for real-time systems, SPARC
Stations, AT&T 3B, and Amdahl mainframes.
When I started as
UNIX Counselor, I became heavily involved with installing and selling the use
of Usenet at Holmdel and throughout all the Bell Labs locations and projects.
My part was mentioned in this History. “The creation of
ARPANET mailing lists in the 1970s and of Usenet newsgroups in 1979 provide a
modern means for the kind of democracy Paine admired.”
After a year or so, I became a full Member of
the Technical Staff (MTS), the universal job description for any technical
person with a Master's degree. The HR people were
quite puzzled by my Aero degree. I was possibly the only one in the labs.
Eventually, enough people became
knowledgeable in UNIX and C to take over the handholding and hotline work. I
moved on to help individual projects with their uses of the computer
center that had grown to hundreds of UNIX machines. When AT&T was broken
up by antitrust court cases, I was promoted to MTS Supervisor of the Computer
Center of American Bell, a new company formed by AT&T to market networks
and equipment outside of the regulated monopoly. American Bell built a building
a few miles away from Holmdel.
A few months later, Lucent Technologies was
formed as a new name of the Western Electric Division of AT&T and absorbed
American Bell. I became the Supervisor of the Lucent Gazelle Project Computer
Center in Holmdel. Gazelle's computer center had doubled in size each year and
had 22 VAX-780s and several other systems. When I left it, we were installing a
big Amdahl 22-VAX equivalent computer, while keeping all the computers we
already had. I had a staff of 9.
I was totally unprepared to be a Bell Labs
Supervisor. I did not have the people skills or temperament to handle the job.
After a year of utter Hell, I got in a dispute with my Department
head over a promise he had made to one of my people of a promotion he then
reneged. I moved to the Merlin Project as an MTS (keeping my Supervisor
pay scale). My family and I were much relieved.
Merlin was a tiny PBX for small offices. A
tremendous success for Lucent. They sold millions of them. I worked on
integrating the Merlin with the new AT&T-Olivetti Personal Computer (an IBM
PC clone). The Merlin had just a Z-80 CPU and no external connections, so that
was a hopeless task, but it was fun playing with voice cards on the PC.
This picture is Virginia, Ann, Paul, John,
David, Mary, me, and Betsy, taken just after David arrives from Korea.
Over the 22 years with Bell Labs, I held MTS
jobs with many projects. It was quite easy for projects to move and trade
people, and for people to move and change positions. The Bell
Labs culture fostered that. I have had offices and computer installations
in nearby Holmdel, Lincroft, and Middletown. My focus on all these jobs was
training and helping the work of others. Making their jobs easier and more
successful. Usually, by introducing new computer languages (C, C++, TK/TCL,
PHP, Java) and computer networking into projects.
A notable project was Transview, the
commercialization of the network control system used by AT&T Long Lines to
monitor and control the nation's long-distance network. I oversaw the graphics
software of the myriad Sun SPARCstations used for the giant video wall displays
and operators. We sold a system to Mexico and the Netherlands. The project was
complicated by the disparity between the US with very few routes and hubs
running at 45MHz and the densely packed Netherlands with many more
routes at 2MHz.
One time, AT&T
had a layoff to cut costs, and I was able to retire with 5 years added to my
age, 5 to my years of service, 20% increase in pension, and full retirement
benefits. The day I left AT&T, I went downstairs in Holmdel to work on a
project in Lucent at the same pay grade and roughly the same work with people I
had worked with on other projects. Years later, I retired for good from Lucent
just as they closed the Holmdel building.
[The term Bell Labs is rightly used for any
of the many installations and organizations that initially held the name as
part of AT&T. Bell Labs is a shared culture and history. The official Bell
Labs is a tiny research lab in Murray Hill owned by Nokia Corporation.
Lucent is now a division of the French corporation Acutel. AT&T is a
gigantic financial conglomerate in Texas.]
In addition to computer center work with UNIX
and C, I worked with Sun SPARC stations and graphics, C++, and Java languages,
and integrated the internet and web into projects. I introduced Usenet Email
and bulletin board at Holmdel, web mastered the first Bell Labs wide website
(using the University of Illinois software that became Netscape), and introduced Tcl/TK and Java to several projects. I
traveled to teach UNIX Internals, C, and Tcl/TK at many Bell Labs locations. I
taught Java at Brookdale Junior College for 2 semesters.
When
the kids left for college and life away from Fair Haven, we moved to a smaller
3-bedroom, 2-bath home nearby in Tinton Falls, NJ. Taxes were much less; the
house was much easier to maintain and closer to work. Our health was failing as
we got older, so we planned to move in a few years to Seabrook, a CCRC near us.
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