[today’s run: nada]
Ok, so we left off with my college jobs.
After college I was unemployed for about 6 months (actually, I think I kept working a little bit with the physics guys during this time). My wife had a job and they wanted her to relocate to Chicago, so we did that. I found my first ever full-time career-type job as a computer programmer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on 33 W. Monroe in downtown Chicago. My college work was in architecture and computer science, so this was just up my alley (or so it would seem).
SOM is a big multi-office architecture firm. They had written their own CAD package (computer aided design). And then they got a contract with IBM to rewrite it in a sale-able form.
I was a flunky programmer. In nearly all of my college classes we were programming in Pascal. This was in “C”, so I had to get up to speed with the language and the environment, which was a box called IBM PC-RT and ran an early version of the AIX operating system. I think my starting salary was about 26k. I remember a few people that I worked with. The boss of the group was Eric Fishhaut. There was Craig Voss and Young Lee, and lots of other people I can picture but can’t put a name to.
In particular there was one guy who was in the tier above the flunkies and I don’t remember his name. He and I worked on adding a pan and zoom feature to the new software which replaced a hardware feature they had on the old system.
Their old system was on big Tektronix 4014 vector graphics terminals. They didn’t use a mouse but had separate horizontal and vertical thumbwheels. The terminal itself had some processing power in it and would allow zooming and panning of the displayed picture.
I also remember being given a big stack of 5-1/4 floppy disks and told to tear the labels off so that we could re-write them and use them to send system images back to IBM.
I remember that they had a very impressive debugging system that we compiled into every source file. I don’t remember anything about source code control or database work (was there a database?). I don’t remember any code reviews or anything like that.
One task I was given was to program up a routine to convert line segments into polygons. And I researched that and made a cool tree algorithm which grabbed some random point and then followed the lines and looked for loops. Unfortunately, that wasn’t really what they wanted so someone else rewrote it and mine got tossed.
At first we lived in an apartment building out near the Kennedy Expressway, off of Cumberland Ave. I would walk over to the El station and ride down to one of the loop stops and walk to my job. It was relatively handy. We weren’t in the apartment very long before we decided to buy a place out west of Schaumburg. From then on I rode the Metra train from the Schaumburg station to Union Station and walked across the Loop to the office. It was a little bit more daunting because I usually rode my bicycle from our townhouse to the train station, mostly on a bike path/sidewalk, frequently in the dark.
How long was I there? I don’t remember, maybe 18-24 months. And I got a call from a headhunter. He asked me if I was interested in doing something else. I told him, if he could get me $36k I would be. He did, and I left.
The firm was built on a partnership system and our project was under one particular partner based on doing the work for IBM. I know they had a lot of future features planned and I don’t know if the product ever was successful. Somewhere around here I have a copy of an advertisement from a magazine about the IBM Architecture and Engineering Series software (AES). That was it.
Partnerships are kind of goofy, can be very political. It’s like having competing teams. Maybe one partner is in the ascendency and some others are drifting downward. The flunkies try to hook up with the new projects and the exciting partner. That’s too much for me to try to keep up with.
I wasn’t there long enough to be anything more than a flunky programmer.