[Today’s run: maybe later]
The headhunter got me an interview with SPSS on North Michigan Ave and they hired me to work in the Unix porting group.
SPSS at that time produced a statistics package for crunching up big social sciences data sets, national polls and census-type stuff. It had been developed on mainframe systems and they were porting it to various flavors of Unix.
This was in the late 1980’s and there were a lot of developments in computer processors. The computer manufacturers would then have to put some kind of OS on their new one-off computer with custom processor and the shortest route was to make a new flavor of Unix for their box. I think we had about a dozen different flavors in-house and a few conversions going on remotely. The real cutting-edge work was going on with early versions of Windows, but I had no interest there. (I did work on one Windows project for a bit with Tex Hull, one of the founders of the company. But he was still doing technical work. He had a very nice office and his hobby was racing sailboats.)
My office mate was a guy who worked in Q/A (I think), named Jim Hagensick. And I believe my boss was Jon Fry (maybe he was just an “elder” under my same boss).
SPSS had started out as a academic project and there was a completely different office culture compared to SOM. I liked it. People were laid back and “personal style” was not such a big deal.
I worked with Fortran and C compilers. I learned about things like big-endian/little-endian, floating point number format, stuff that distinguishes one processor from another. I also learned a little bit about statistics and computer math. One of my tasks involved building a ” dynamic user exit” for Oracle version 6. That was my first exposure to database work.
(You know, I’m recalling that we may have used Ingres as the database underlying the project at SOM at the previous job. But I didn’t do anything with it directly.)
One thing I remember doing is writing a big long shell-script to do the install of the SPSS package on Sun-OS. I also gave a class to a room full of mainframe guys about how to do command-line Unix stuff.
Considering the fact that almost all of my computer experience during college had been on Vax-VMS with Pascal, it is interesting that I was now a C/Unix expert.
SPSS was located at 444 (?) N. Michigan Ave. I would ride the Metra commuter train to Union Station (SW corner of the loop) and walk up to the office on the NE corner of the loop. I worked out various strategies to handle rain/snow days: there were quite a few tunnels and passages to keep out of the weather. Our office building was across from the Tribune Tower and another old tower which they were refurbishing. I frequently could visit other’s offices that looked out over Lake Michigan. It was a nice place.
We lived out west of Schaumburg at this time. I enjoyed working downtown and I didn’t mind the commute on the train. But I really didn’t like the congestion of the suburbs. We had been keeping an eye out for openings back in Iowa and I spotted an advertisement in the Des Moines newspaper for Unix people (an oddity at that time and place). I applied, interviewed and was hired. We moved back to Des Moines in the spring of 1990.
I believe I worked at SPSS for 2 years, more or less.