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Oral History of George A. Michael; 2006-01-17

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Oral History of George A. Michael; 2006-01-17 Oral History of George Michael Interviewed by: Eugene Miya Edited by: Dag Spicer Recorded: January 17, 2006 March 14, 2006 May 9, 2006 July 12, 2006 July 25, 2006 September 15, 2006 Mountain View, California CHM Reference number: X3418.2006 © 2006 Computer History Museum Oral History of George Michael Eugene Miya: Okay, we'll start off first with Anel’s sort of standard pat questions and then from there we'll elaborate everything. So, CHM wants me to ask you, early years, project and than overall kinds of things. You went to a lot of projects obviously, so let's start off with your early years to keep things simple. Where did you grow up? George Michael: Buffalo, New York. Miya: Do you want to say some more about Buffalo? Michael: Well, when we grew up there it was a blue collar town and it was – the biggest virtue from my point of view was it was right across the river from Canada, which I loved. We used to go up there all the time, swim, hike and bicycle and I liked it. Miya: Okay, just to get things out of the way, what did your mother and father do? Michael: Well my father was a train master and then station master for New York Central in Buffalo. My mother was a house maker or a housekeeper, or whatever you want to call it; a mother who stayed at home, unusual today. Miya: How many siblings do you have? Michael: One. Miya: A boy or - Michael: A sister. Miya: A sister, younger or older? Michael: Younger. Miya: And her name was? Michael: Dorothy. Miya: Is she still alive? Michael: Yes. Miya: How many years younger? Michael: Two. CHM Ref: X3418.2006 © 2006 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 251 Oral History of George Michael Miya: Okay, and if we wanted to get in touch with her, where does she live? Michael: In Hamburg, New York. Miya: Okay, and - Michael: Which is a suburb of Buffalo. Miya: Okay, what's her last name now? Michael: Cook. Miya: Dorothy Cook, okay. What are your – were your youngest thoughts about what you wanted to do when you grew up? Provide some inspiration for young people here, ah see we have the George Michael humor here. Michael: I don't think I had any thought except that I remember reading about the transmutation of one element into another by driving particles into the nucleus and I thought that would be a good thing, take some lead and make gold, but I never went any further then thinking about it. Other than that, I think I wanted to just be a good swimmer, a football player, runner, outdoors person in general. Miya: How old were you when you had that series of thoughts about transmutation? Michael: I don't know 12, 11 somewhere around there. Miya: Sixth grade? Elementary school? Michael: It was probably sixth or seventh grade, yeah. Miya: Bear with me on the next question; I know how you feel about this. Michael: All right. Miya: Who were your idols when growing up? Michael: I don't remember any. Miya: Okay. Michael: Well that's not strictly true. Actually, when I was – I took a job as a laborer in a feed mill and the guy who was my boss was kind of an idol in the sense he could pick up in each hand a 100 pound bag of feed and walk around with them and yelling at people to get busy and get their work done and stuff like that. He was quite a guy. He also taught me an enormous amount about how to survive strength CHM Ref: X3418.2006 © 2006 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 251 Oral History of George Michael issues without wrecking your body. The word that he used was don't commit your weight and that's a good piece of advice as it turns out. Miya: Do you remember what your boss's name was? Michael: I don't remember his name. I know we called him Happy and had the interesting experience after the war of going with one of my uncles up to Port Colborne, Canada and meeting Happy there when we had supper in a little bar, and it was very nice. He remembered me, I remembered him, nice guy. Miya: So you stayed in touch with him briefly after the war? Michael: Nope. Miya: That was it? Just that one day? Michael: That was just this one time I saw him there and – the business of keeping in contact just wasn't very common for people. Miya: Okay. This is going to be a long one for you. When and how were you first exposed to computers? Michael: That would have to be in 1953 after I graduated from college and went to work at the – what's now called the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). At the time it was called the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Livermore and I arrived on the 16th of April in 1953 and the Univac 1 arrived one week later. It was clearly the first experience with a computer that we had. It didn't dawn on me what was important about computers for perhaps a half a year. They were just adding machines if you will and we had the interesting experience that the calculations that we were going to do were carried out to 12 decimal digits and we had a crew of desk calculating people on whose hand calculators Monroe's and Marchants and Fridens, and every number that the Univac 1 produced was reproduced by a numerical calculation carried out by hand. When there was some doubt, people tended to trust the hand calculation more then the computer calculation and I think subsequently that's certainly been the wrong thing. Univac did make mistakes but it had this beautiful virtue of correcting them, and if it couldn't correct it, it would stop. So the Univac was a decimal machine and it was the first machine and to me, and I think to all the other people who were the using thing, decimal was natural. That concept of binary hadn't occurred to anybody then, and again, that's not quite true. One of the guys used to come regularly to the laboratory for consulting work with John von Neumann- Miya: We'll get to him. Michael: - the mathematician and he was pushing binary calculations. But other than that everybody else felt that if you entered a number like .1 it should come out as .1 and not as a repeating decimal as it was with binary notation. But we overcame that, we've outgrown decimal. Miya: Okay. CHM Ref: X3418.2006 © 2006 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 251 Oral History of George Michael Michael: Well you know - Miya: Yeah; no, we'll get that at a further degree. Michael: All right. Miya: We talked about the value of decimal machines are for you and I in the past. We should probably say that we've known – you and I have known each other for almost 25 years I guess. Michael: Has it been that long? Miya: I hate to say it, yeah, I think so; something of that order. Do you want to say anything in terms of the when and how – do you want to say anything a little bit about the town of Livermore, by the way? This is where you received the Univac. Michael: Well yeah. Miya: How big was the laboratory at the time? Michael: Livermore's – actual location was next to a naval air field that was chosen as one of the few places in the Bay Area that had few foggy nights, so people could land there all the time. Other than that, I felt that Livermore was a mean, pinched, little town and I've never seen much to change my mind about that. It's now a big mean, pinched town. At the time when we got there I think there were only three or four paved streets in Livermore and that was a virtue and I thought it was very charming to be able to go to a real general store and buy groceries, hardware, kerosene lamp chimneys, curing salts for meat, all of it there in one store. That store went out of business unfortunately very soon after we got there. We were not particularly welcomed when we got to Livermore. The people who lived there, I think rightly, were worried about all these stupid others who were coming to the rad lab, or they called it the atomic; they're a strange breed of people and all they could see was that the existence of the laboratory there would be a big source of causing them to have larger taxes. I remember the rotten gun club passed a resolution that said if you weren't a native Livermoron, you couldn't vote on financial issues in the rotten gun club. This was essentially to protect their little treasury which is a whole $8,000. But things have moved on from then and the rotten gun club is still there, Livermore is much bigger. It went from 3,200 people to close to 70,000, I do not consider that an improvement. Miya: So the lab was there in part because there was a naval air station there with a field that could be - Michael: Yeah, the background on that is that it's almost folklore.
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