[Today’s run:\u00a0 maybe later]<\/p>\n
The headhunter got me an interview with SPSS on North Michigan Ave and they hired me to work in the Unix porting group.<\/p>\n
SPSS at that time produced a statistics package for crunching up big social sciences data sets, national polls and census-type stuff.\u00a0 It had been developed on mainframe systems and they were porting it to various flavors of Unix.<\/p>\n
This was in the late 1980’s and there were a lot of developments in computer processors.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I think we had about a dozen different flavors in-house and a few conversions going on remotely.\u00a0 The real cutting-edge work was going on with early versions of Windows, but I had no interest there.\u00a0 (I did work on one Windows project for a bit with Tex Hull, one of the founders of the company.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But he was still doing technical work. He had a very nice office and his hobby was racing sailboats.)<\/p>\n
My office mate was a guy who worked in Q\/A\u00a0 (I think), named Jim Hagensick.\u00a0 And I believe my boss was Jon Fry (maybe he was just an “elder” under my same boss).<\/p>\n
SPSS had started out as a academic project and there was a completely different office culture compared to SOM.\u00a0 I liked it.\u00a0 People were laid back and “personal style” was not such a big deal.<\/p>\n
I worked with Fortran and C compilers.\u00a0 I learned about things like big-endian\/little-endian, floating point number format, stuff that distinguishes one processor from another.\u00a0 I also learned a little bit about statistics and computer math.\u00a0 One of my tasks involved\u00a0 building a ” dynamic user exit” for Oracle version 6.\u00a0 That was my first exposure to database work.<\/p>\n
(You know, I’m recalling that we may have used Ingres as the database underlying the project at SOM\u00a0 at the previous job.\u00a0 But I didn’t do anything with it directly.)<\/p>\n
One thing I remember doing is writing a big long shell-script to do the install of the SPSS package on Sun-OS.\u00a0 I also gave a class to a room full of mainframe guys about how to do command-line Unix stuff.<\/p>\n
Considering the fact that almost all of my computer experience during college had been on Vax-VMS with Pascal, it is interesting\u00a0 that I was now\u00a0 a C\/Unix expert.<\/p>\n
SPSS was located at 444 (?) N. Michigan Ave.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I worked out various strategies to handle rain\/snow days:\u00a0 there were quite a few tunnels and passages to keep out of the weather.\u00a0 Our office building was across from the Tribune Tower and another old tower which they were refurbishing.\u00a0 I frequently could visit other’s offices that looked out over Lake Michigan.\u00a0 It was a nice place.<\/p>\n
We lived out west of Schaumburg at this time.\u00a0 I enjoyed working downtown and I didn’t mind the commute on the train.\u00a0 But I really didn’t like the congestion of the suburbs.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 I applied, interviewed and was hired.\u00a0 We moved back to Des Moines in the spring of 1990.<\/p>\n
I believe I worked at SPSS for 2 years, more or less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It had been developed on mainframe systems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267","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=4267"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4275,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions\/4275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}