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Cabin John MD
(Naval Ship R&D Center 1971-1980)
The Naval Ship R&D Center NSRDC (usually
called the David Taylor Model Basin DTMB) near Bethesda, MD, had installed a
complex of super-computers from Control Data. One of the features of the
complex was a Digigraphics graphics terminal. I was hired to help apply
graphics to Navy problems. I was supposed to be a guru, so I grew a beard to
look a bit older and wiser.
I sold my Bedford house and bought a run-down
rambler near downtown Silver Spring, MD. NSRDC had hired a bunch of new
graduate mathematicians in anticipation of the supercomputer installation.
There was a whole bunch of newly married and soon-to-be-married young people
there, a different atmosphere than I was used to.
I flew (Eastern Airlines) down to Orlando,
FL, where Betsy had just started as Youth Minister at a Winter Park church. She
agreed to my proposal, and we were married soon after in NYC. We are living
happily ever after.
By far, the best years of my life.
Betsy and Mel
in Winter Park.
The Silver Spring house was too far from the
Model Basin, so we sold it and moved to a home in Cabin John, a short
bicycle ride to work.
The Silver
Spring house when we sold it. The cars are my Barracuda and Betsy's Impala.
I could cycle home for lunch in summer or
meet Betsy and the kids after work at the nearby community pool complex. We got
along great as a couple and fit well into our community and society. Many of
our best friends are from the Cabin John days, which our daughter, Ann, called
"the golden years."
We started to build our family. Six kids
adopted from Korea. At that time, Korea was having economic problems, and it
was easy to adopt kids in need. We did not have to go to Korea to get them.
We had a big problem with the racist bigot,
Senator Eastland from Mississippi. We had to get a bill through Congress to
allow John (age 5) into the country. Eastland retired, and we had no similar
problems for Virginia and David.
Mel, Paul
Sellers, Mom, Betsy, Paul, Ann, John, and Mary in front of our Cabin John
house.
Soon after John arrived, we took a family
trip in Betsy's 2-door Impala. Three little kids in the low back seat were
uncomfortable. My mom bought us a 1976 full-size window van (we traded in my
Barracuda). We had many long trips, including one to Rochester, MN to visit my
sister, and back through Canada and Niagara Falls.
We camped in a big blue 3-room tent
(gifted by a good friend who had the tent at Woodstock). We later got an
old camper trailer. The van finally gave out at over 100,000 miles. We have had
many other cars as the kids started to drive and ended up with our 2009 Prius.
The work was interesting and covered many
parts of the Center: hydrodynamics, acoustics, structures, seakeeping,
propulsion, and computer science.
In addition to graphics work, I was heavily
invested in spreading interactive terminal use throughout the Center. I
installed and publicized EDIT, an easy-to-use text editing program, on the CDC
and Boroughs computers and spread the use of RATFOR, a more forgiving
programming language from the book Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger of
Bell Labs.
I made a prototype real-time seakeeping
contour plotting system on the Tektronix storage tube terminal. This was to
become the basis of eventual installations on the bridges of ships to help the
crew navigate through heavy seas.
We were a node on the
original ARPAnet (the predecessor of today's internet) in a big experiment
to integrate math from MIT Macsyma symbolic
algebra system on a PDP-10 in Cambridge, MA, with Navy Nastran structural analysis on the CDC 6700
here at NSRDC, with project supervision from the network center in Los
Angeles, CA. I did the work on Macsyma using a 10 character/sec Teletype-33. My
email address and office phone number are in the original ARPAnet phone directory.
I won a year paid sabbatical to go back to
college. Most winners went to Stanford, MIT, Penn, or elsewhere to get their
MS. I did not want to leave home and already had a Masters, so I enrolled at
George Washington in a non-degree program. I commuted downtown for mostly
evening classes in math, computer science, and hydrodynamics. I got to do some
fun hydromechanics experiments in the wave basins at Ft. Belvoir. The course on
differential equations was challenging for me, and I almost flunked it. One project
was to write a full FORTRAN-77 compiler for the TI-9900 microcomputer in
SNOBOL (the professor was the author of our SNOBOL textbook). I was able to get
the full compiler written and desk-checked for running on the 9900. Writing in
an advanced computer language and targeting for an advanced microcomputer
really paid off. Years later, Ivan Polonsky, one of the authors of the SNOBOL
language, became a good friend and coworker at Bell Labs.
It was becoming
difficult to live on my government salary. There was no chance for promotion,
and inflation (12% in one year) was a killer. We had to sell Betsy's car and
stop work on a needed addition to the house. I started to look for another job
and used the lab's new UNIX PDP-11 system with word
processing and daisy-wheel printer for my resume and letters (with permission
as training and evaluation). One submission to a 2-line ad in the New York
Times bore fruit. Bell Labs Holmdel needed a counselor for their expanding UNIX
installations. They were an old-time IBM shop, and few there knew how to spell
UNIX.
We sold the Cabin
John house with the attic replaced by a partially completed 3 bedroom, 1 bath
addition to a friend of a friend who wanted the location, and a large driveway
with garage for his beer pump business. The buyer expanded the house further and
completely gutted and remodeled it. We got enough to buy a 6-bedroom, 3-bath
home in Fair Haven, NJ. We lived there quite happily with the kids in excellent
schools and were involved with scouts and the community.
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