[today’s run: nada]<\/p>\n
Ok, so we left off with my college jobs.<\/p>\n
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).\u00a0 My wife had a job and they wanted her to relocate to Chicago, so we did that.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My college work was in architecture and computer science, so this was just up my alley (or so it would seem).<\/p>\n
SOM is a big multi-office architecture firm.\u00a0 They had written their own CAD package (computer aided design).\u00a0 And then they got a contract with IBM to rewrite it in a sale-able form.<\/p>\n
I was a flunky programmer.\u00a0 In nearly all of my college classes we were programming in Pascal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I think my starting salary was about 26k.\u00a0 I remember\u00a0 a few people that I worked with.\u00a0 The boss of the group was Eric Fishhaut.\u00a0 There was Craig Voss\u00a0\u00a0 and\u00a0 Young Lee, and lots of other people I can picture but can’t put a name to.<\/p>\n
In particular there was one guy who was in the tier above the flunkies and I don’t remember his name.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Their old system was on big Tektronix 4014 vector graphics terminals.\u00a0 They didn’t use a mouse but had separate horizontal and vertical thumbwheels.\u00a0 The terminal itself had some processing power in it and would allow zooming and panning of the displayed picture.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I remember that they had a very impressive debugging system that we compiled into every source file.\u00a0 I don’t remember anything about source code control or database work (was there a database?).\u00a0 I don’t remember any code reviews or anything like that.<\/p>\n
One task I was given was to program up a routine to convert line segments into polygons.\u00a0 And I researched that and made a cool tree algorithm which grabbed some random point and then followed the lines and looked for loops.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that wasn’t really what they wanted so someone else rewrote it and mine got tossed.<\/p>\n
At first we lived in an apartment building out near the Kennedy Expressway, off of Cumberland Ave.\u00a0 I would walk over to the El station and ride down to one of the loop stops and walk to my job.\u00a0 It was relatively handy.\u00a0 We weren’t in the apartment very long before we decided to buy a place out west of Schaumburg.\u00a0 From then on I rode the Metra train from the Schaumburg station to Union Station and walked across the Loop to the office.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
How long was I there?\u00a0 I don’t remember, maybe 18-24 months. And I got a call from a headhunter.\u00a0 He asked me if I was interested in doing something else.\u00a0 I told him, if he could get me $36k\u00a0 I would be.\u00a0 He did, and I left.<\/p>\n
The firm was built on a partnership system and our project was under one particular partner based on doing the work for IBM.\u00a0 I know they had a lot of future features planned and I don’t know if the product ever was successful.\u00a0\u00a0 Somewhere around here I have a copy of an advertisement from a magazine about the IBM Architecture and Engineering Series software (AES).\u00a0 That was it.<\/p>\n
Partnerships are kind of goofy, can be very political.\u00a0 It’s like having competing teams.\u00a0 Maybe one partner is in the ascendency and some others are drifting downward.\u00a0 The flunkies try to hook up with the new projects and the exciting partner.\u00a0 That’s too much for me to try to keep up with.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t there long enough to be anything more than a flunky programmer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[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).\u00a0 My wife had a job and they wanted her to relocate to Chicago, so we did that.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4262"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4266,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions\/4266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}