A Technical History of National CSS By Harold Feinleib Written: March 4, 2005 CHM Reference number: R0363.2016 A Technical History of National CSS By Harold Feinleib I knew I wanted to go into computers when I got my first program to work. That was quite a thrill. It happened in 1964 during my senior year at Cornell when I took the only course given in computers. I had to look to the Electrical Engineering school where we worked on a Burroughs 220, a computer filled with thousands of vacuum tubes that took up a good sized room. It was actually a very nice computer because it worked in decimal instead of binary. That memorable program was of course a Sort program—I had to sort a list of numbers. I wonder how many sort programs have been written before or since. It must be millions. With great enthusiasm, I interviewed at the campus-recruiting program where companies sent people to find new employees for their organization. In the 1960’s, unlike today, the job market was very active and no one had a problem getting started right after they graduated from college. I got some interest from three companies: Equitable Life to work in their actuarial program in New York City; IBM as a programmer to work in upstate NY; and with the Service Bureau Corporation to also work in midtown Manhattan. New York City was very appealing to me; I was 20 years old, and living in Manhattan was a very exciting prospect, so I took great interest in the Equitable and the SBC interviews. The two companies couldn’t have been more opposite in their approach. At Equitable I met with a senior executive who took me to lunch in their executive dining room at the top of their office tower. He was very cordial and didn’t ask me any probing questions. I guess I was supposed to be impressed by their prestigious office. Shortly thereafter I received an offer letter with a good starting salary of $7500 a year in their actuarial program. SBC was a different story. I was hardly greeted when I arrived. I was asked to wait in a somewhat disheveled conference room and after quite some time someone came in and slid a sheet of paper toward me and said I should work on it. There were 10 very tough questions on the paper, what we would call brainteasers. They didn’t tell me how long I had or how I should show my answers. The only question I remember to this day was—if you had an orange and you could make four slices, what is the maximum number of pieces you could cut the orange into. I made the assumption that you had to hold the orange together while doing the cutting; otherwise the answer was simple. The others were logic or algebra questions—you know the type—if Tom is an X and Jim is a Y and all X’s are also Y’s, then what is...blah, blah, blah? Or if one train is going 60 miles an hour and another train is going 45 miles an hour...?? I wish I had a copy of the questions today; they were a very good aid for recruiting. Well, I worked on the questions; I knew I couldn’t answer all of them (they were really tough), but wasn’t too concerned. Eventually someone came down and asked for my answers and went away. I waited some more and then was asked to come upstairs to speak with a young woman who asked me to go over each of the questions so she could see how I approached each one. I think I really impressed her when we went over the one with the orange, because I derived a formula, which showed that the maximum number was 15 pieces. I did this by first using a 1 dimensional line, given two cuts, then a 2 dimensional flat surface given 3 cuts and extrapolating to a 3 dimensional object with 4 cuts. The formula I came up n with was 2 -1, where n is the number of cuts. It is easy to see how a line can be cut into 3 pieces and a sheet of paper can be cut into 7 pieces. It is not so easy to visualize how a 3 dimensional object could be cut into 15 pieces. I got an offer to start at $6700 from SBC. While this was 10% less than Equitable’s offer I took the job. To this day I am glad I made that choice because it opened me up to a very exciting and personally rewarding career. SBC was a great place to work. It was a subsidiary of IBM at that time, although later it had to be sold to Control Data Corporation as part of an agreement to settle a suit that CDC had against IBM. I was a member of an excellent staff that did consulting work to companies that needed programs written. Therefore the work was varied. All the people at SBC were young, in their 20’s or early thirties except for a handful of executives (almost everyone in computing in those days was young). When I started work, I entered a 13-week training program that was awesome; we were taught several languages and how to CHM Ref: R0363.2016 © 2016 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 8 A Technical History of National CSS By Harold Feinleib program. The instructor was terrific and every week that went by the class got smaller and smaller until only about half of the 30 starters were still there. The instructor’s role was not only to train the new hires, but also to screen them by examining their work. And he knew pretty quickly if someone wasn’t getting it. One thing that I have learned over the years is if someone isn’t real good at programming, they shouldn’t bother; it is not a forgiving profession. They won’t produce anything worthwhile; all they will do is make a mess. The best people will easily do the work of 3 “average” programmers, and will be able to tackle problems that others couldn’t get to first base with. Fortunately, I have had the pleasure of working with a number of the best. SBC exposed me to a wide variety of problems. Their biggest account was IBM itself, where SBC worked on developing operating systems and other systems programs. So, not only did I get experience in developing applications, but I also learned a little bit about systems programs, which at that time were considered a higher form of the art. This gave me a double perspective of computers: how business people wanted to use them and also how systems programmers developed tools to make it easier to create business applications. One perspective was focused outward and the other inward. One job I worked on was TSS/360, a huge IBM undertaking to develop a time-sharing system for the new IBM 360/67, IBM’s first production machine with virtual memory. TSS was being developed at IBM’s Mohansic Labs and there were hundreds of people working on it, both IBMers and contractors; there were a lot of very smart people (I was very impressed at the time, especially with my limited experience). They all felt that they were inventing the future and the sense of excitement was very high. TSS was a very well designed system, except for one thing; it wasn’t buildable at that point in time. The 360/67, although a very powerful computer at that time, was still not powerful enough to run TSS. TSS’ memory requirements were too demanding to perform well. Memory at that time was very expensive— 256K, yes 1/4 of 1 megabyte cost $400,000. Today 256 megabytes costs about $38 and is at least 100 times faster. That is an improvement of 1 billion times To understand this, 256 megabytes is 1000 times as much memory at a cost of 1/10,000 with a speed improvement of 100 times. Multiplying these together yields: 1000*10,000*100 or 1 billion. th It was great working in Mohansic. I lived on 60 street and Third Avenue and SBC had me lease a car so I could pick up some others and drive back and forth to Mohansic, which was north of NYC on the Taconic Parkway. This gave me a car in Manhattan, and the place I leased it from let me park it in their garage, which was right across the street from where I lived. Imagine that, living on the Upper East Side with a car, and I was barely 21. Since the Vietnam War was heating up in 1965 and I was of a prime age to be drafted, SBC decided that I should work on a project for Lincoln Laboratories in Lexington, Massachusetts. Lincoln was a government run science lab, which would enable me to get a defense deferment. I learned a great deal at Lincoln working with Frank Belvin and Jack Arnow (both of whom went on to form Interactive Data Corporation). After working there for a short while, Jack offered me a position as a Staff Member at Lincoln, a prestigious position, which gave me a more secure draft deferment. Now it so happened that Lincoln Labs was also one of the prime customers for TSS/360 together with Bell Labs and a couple of other big companies.