An Interview with DAVID ALAN GRIER, Ph.D. Conducted by Janet Abbate On 26 May 2015 Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia IEEE Computer Society Copyright, IEEE Abbate: I’m talking with David Alan Grier on May 26, 2015. We are in the luxurious Virginia Tech conference room. I want to start with your education and early computing career. Grier: Okay. Abbate: You got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Middleburg College in 1978. Grier: Yes. Abbate: Were you always interested in math? Is that sort of something you knew you wanted to do? Grier: No. I was sort of wavering between engineering and some form of computing, and Middlebury had neither. I chose the college because a lot of people around me, my family and teachers in high school, thought that I would be well matched for a liberal arts college. And when I got accepted they said far and away this is the best college you’ve gotten into; you should consider it. And so I chose it, and got there and discovered that they had one computer class, which I could have taught at that point, and as I drifted around and tried different things math seemed to be the best fit for me. There is a side of this that I did not realize at the time, that there is a fairly long tradition of math in my family, particularly my Mom’s mother, my grandmother; and that I was probably more immersed in the culture of it than I had thought. Abbate: Interesting. So you, as you’ve alluded to, already had some background in computing. You father worked for UNIVAC. 2 Grier: Yes. My father joined UNIVAC in 1957 and then moved to Burroughs in 1964. While he was at UNIVAC he was trained, initially, as a product support person, we would say. After moving to Minneapolis for him to work in the collider factory — it was right at the time CDC split up — I believe he was offered to go with CDC as a new employee because he was an engineer and interested in computing. I believe that my Dad’s fundamental conservatism of having two really little kids got in the way of that, and he very much wanted to be in the field, and decided to stay with UNIVAC. They quickly trained him and sent him to Texas, a state he never once in his life considered that he was going to live; and lived there for the next seven or so years. In Texas, he was a manager of services that were provided by the SMU Computing Center, which has an interesting history because it splits off and five or six of the members there go off and form University Computing Services; and then another group go off to California and form an early computer group there. He worked for the oil industry and did a lot of traveling around and working with heads of engineering for small drilling firms and small refining firms, and selling them computer services which, in the 1950s and early 1960s they didn’t think they really needed. [Laughs.] Abbate: Hard sell. Grier: It was a hard sell. Because of that and because I started becoming aware of what Dad was doing, he would take me into the office on Saturdays. It was a UNIVAC; a Cray-designed UNIVAC 1103. I just was fascinated by the boxes and the machinery, and Dad, to keep me out of trouble, would let me play on the card punch, which was great fun for a kindergarten and first grader. At some point, somewhere there gave me a program that printed banners and showed me how to modify it to change the names on the banners, the size, and that would keep me busy for all of Saturday. There was one Saturday that — completely unaware, we now know — that it was a completely field defined program and I had typed in the wrong field, and I slewed out an entire box of 3 paper. I thought that was exceptionally cool but it got me banned from the computer room for, I remember forever, but it was probably a week, a month, something like that. But to see this machine spewing out paper was just so cool. So that was my first entrance in it. Then we moved to Detroit with Burroughs. The motivation was UNIVAC didn’t know what to do with that office, and the fact that University Computing split off from it about the same time, was I think a measure of what they didn’t know. Burroughs was then very clearly the number two firm. This was right when the 360 comes out, so IBM does not have an obvious technical lead; that becomes obvious four years later. And Burroughs was in banking, and was on the verge of coming out with this new machine, the Burroughs B5000, and Dad was on the product management team. I haven’t done the work to figure out what it was; he was not the product manager, but he was a product manager of it, and there is a Datamation Magazine cartoon with a story about the Burroughs B5000 that has my Dad standing next to it saying, “My name is Tom Grier and I touched a B5000. So because of that, again, I had the same kind of access; Dad would take me down to the office on Saturday, or my brother and I would take the bus downtown. I’m kind of amazed that he let us do that. Abbate: How old were you at that point? Grier: Nine or 10. And [he] let us play. We really weren’t programming at that point, but we certainly were playing with the card punch machine and doing a little bit of modifying stuff. Then as a teenager a couple of things happened; I got an operator intern job that paid me an outrageous sum of money, which was probably minimum wage but for a teenager it was great fun. I stayed up all night, mounted tapes and took tapes off, and played around with the computer. Dad started bringing home training manuals that I started working through and learning. Dad, at this point, was put in charge of corporate training on the computer, and so I worked through the B5500 training manuals, and something of the B3500 training manuals, which is a very different architecture. The 4 B5500 is the stack machine that Burroughs was famous for and was a beautiful, brilliant machine that was entirely practical. The 3500 was a much more conventional one; it came out of the electro data series, the Air Force series in the 1950s. I learned that, and there’s a picture I used on the cover of one of my books; that’s Dad standing around a B3500 and I like that, yes. What’s odd about it is he crosses his arms, I’m sitting with my arms crossed, he crosses his arms the other way, and I can’t make that comfortable. So I worked through that, and there is one year in there that we worked through the early volumes, the early versions of Knuth’s three-volume series, and do all of the material. I go up to, obviously, like eighth grade math at that point, and that in many ways, remains the foundation of my computer education. It was a great summer because it was a time of being close to Dad, of really being part of his work and, in particular, seeing the people he worked with. I would often go in with him. We lived in Birmingham, which is a northeast suburb in Oakland County; northwest suburb of Oakland County. And Burroughs at that time was at more or less, Second and Grand River. He would commute and carpool with three or four of his peers. Going in as a young teenager with them and sort of listening to them talk, and listening to their banter, and how they were thinking about problems, was also a very special time that most kids didn’t get. So that summer of working through the problems, of working with Dad, of learning the program, left me in high school with just a lovely computer education that had little applicability. The high school I went to, the school had a NCR Sentry 100 computer, which they let me use against their best interest. I did a whole bunch of things on that that were kind of typical examples of the time. It was again punched cards. I did some sorting routines, I demonstrated a simple database, I was — and still remain — quite interested in music at the time but then I had illusions that I would actually be a performer. I had a friend who was interested in old music, Renaissance era music, so we would design various stringed instruments. Lutes, he built a harpsichord, and to get the string tensions right I wrote the program that did that, which impressed everybody but, you know, it’s fairly straightforward. Bach tempered scale. And that was about it. Dad’s office had cooler stuff 5 and Dad had cooler contacts. Sometime at, I believe it’s around ninth grade, Dad got promoted to be head of the Burroughs User’s Group. I believe he had been head of the user’s group for a long time, but around 1970 they had decided it was something real and it needed a full time executive director. Abbate: That was called CUE? Grier: CUBE, Cooperating Users of Burroughs Equipment.