Computer

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Computer

It was written on the sand and the waves of the sea that I was to become a computer specialists. Anybody contemplating my CV at the age of 18 could have foreseen that.

In the multiplication table I gave up around 7 times 8. Additions I considered below my dignity. Subtractions had theological implications that disgusted me. My demand for Order consisted in piling up everything within reach of where I was sitting. Mathematics were, I am told, taught at the College after the lunch, regretfully I have no memory of what must have been a most interesting course. Statistics I liked as it consisted mostly in teaching girls how to use the mechanical "turn-around-calculating-machine", if you sit on the left of the girl and the calculating machine is on here right, the situation is prone to developments.

When the FAO Development project in Algeria run out of funds, the Organization was forced to pull back. This time we left the duty vehicles behind. As there was still six month free of charge for the Organization on my contract, I was brought back to FAO Head Quarters as midshipman (Associate Expert).

It so happened that this corresponded to a time when my Super Boss was trying to see if he could succumb to Depression under the stress of managing too many funds with too little staff and too little money. Managing projects is like the Chinese Circus trick of spinning plates at the end of rods, running from one rod to another to prevent them from falling. At FAO, the trick was further compounded by the fact that you had to spin the plates with banded eyes and dear friends and colleagues trying to trip you.

My Super Boss was finding out what it meant not to be able to sleep, to worry about lack of funds, to be bypassed by colleagues of the same seniority,

I was given an Office for myself next to the lift, you may call it an Office, if was really the end of the corridor that had been walled off. My Super Boos gave me as order to create and manage any kind of system which would make it possible to remember what we were supposed to do next day and what we had forgotten to do yesterday; So, as we all did in these days, I created a system of management cards which nobody ever consulted, who had the time to go and consult a filing card?

We also had thousands of field demonstrations results coming in each year from all around the world and tens of impatient critics yelling at us that we were charlatans, that fertilizers did not increase crops, that fertilizers impoverished farmers, yet here we were sitting with thousand of results demonstrating the contrary and we could do nothing because nobody had the time to unwrap the parcels.

In those days one Office employed a Very Senior Officer and five to ten secretaries to typists whose only job was to create a yearly report showing that fertilizers were profitable. I suppose that I must take the blame for having made them out of work, which incidentally may explain why these Very Senior Officer never really took to me.

FAO had a computer, having an IBM Computer of the latest generation was a symbol of power; Its only duty was to compute each month our salary. The lastes model of IBM was the least they could do considering the complexity of our salary scheme. Some very revolutionnary minded Officers introduced the idea that the computer could also run other data. While Management was most reluctant to accept such idiotic ideas, Officers managed through the usual web of friends and girl friends to run their results on the FAO computer.

In those days, a computer was like a huge room. I assume that it was like a huge room as all I was authorized to see was the hole in the wall where I deposited the punch cards and the desk where I picked up the print-out.

Computers were used for salaries and stocks, they would run on languages such as COBOL, who has ever had the intention to learn COBOL? We were at the mercy of programming specialists who would sneer when we exposed what we wanted from the computer, but once they had managed to get the price high enough they would prepare a computer programme.

The main characteristic in these days of a good computer programme was that it would spit out a print-out that no normal persons would ever be able to understand. By comparison making sense of the Torah written in Hebrew was child play. i should have kept some of the print-out created by the SAS statistical programme.

At that stage I had my first stroke of genius, I got these print-outs from the computer and to all my colleagues I behaved as if I understood what was printed. I became the Oracle of the Secret Message; it was a totally risk free imposture, who would have found out? But I should not be too proud of myself, my father in his youth got a greater salary on the claim that very few people could read and write Dutch, it took them a long long time to discover that my father had never seen anything in Dutch. It was also a risk free gamble from my fathers part, which Director was going to endorse the stupidity of having engaged as Dutch translator a Swede who knew nothing of Dutch?

Computing had advantages; All data had to be transferred on perforated cards, a job that no man was capable of, a job done by ten Italian girls sitting next to the computer room; it is a mystery why such beautiful girls would choose to sit down in the basement in a very tiny room, punching holes the whole day. Why did they have to be beautiful to be hole card punchers? In theory my job was to walk down seven floors, go the computer room,leave the punch card requests on the desk, wait for the Principal to call me back and come back and collect my punch cards; some idiots really believed that this was the way to do it. Try to have your cards punched around the twentieth when the salary had to be prepared and see how long you would have to wait. So, instead of leaving the request you went in into the hole card punching room and you had a nice chat with the girls. When you felt that the Supervisor at the other end was going to march on you, you left and said:

"oh, by the way, if this is not too much trouble, do you think I could have these few cards punched for to-morrow?"

And you got it.

Had I bee Robert Redford I would have got them immediately.

Once you had your puch cards in your shoe box, you went to the hole in the wall and left the whole package for processing. It must have been at that place that I destroyed my nerves. In the best of all worlds, the processing would be done during the night, not saying which night. The result of the processing was olways the same:

<< error on card 365>>

so you had to go back to your data, find out which results matched card 365, go back tot he punchng girls, beg for card 365 to be repunched, bring it back to the hole int he wall, and a couple of nights later you got:

<< error on card 765 >>

and you went round the circle again, by which time the punching girls, how much sympathy that they had had for you at the start were beginning to treat you as the brother coming to beg for a little loan until next pay day.

Until the triumph day when you got two kilo of print-out (kilo is never spelt with"s"). Your data had been processed; So triumphantly you went back to your Office to scan the data (the word scan did not exist in those days). The firs task was to rip off and throw in the waste paper all results claiming that the yield of maize had been either minus 500 kilo of one hundred thousand tons, who could really care about a hole card punch error?

Then you had the pleasure to work out a summary using your fingers and a mechanical adding machine and run in to the Super Boss Office to show that the results proved, believe the computer, that nothing would cure World Hunger better than fertilizers; And who would dare contradict an FAO computer?

I was not very brilliant, it took me a few years in this trade to discover that other "specialists" were as crooked as I was. We all know that the figures we were using were wrong and the mathematical rules one big joke, but we were very faithful to one another and never let out the big secret.

It took be another decade to understand that all figures and results were the results of similar jokes. The results showing that PrOOOOlit is 23% more efficient that Aspixtd in curing depression were as cooked as my figures were.

However there was no feeling of guilt as I know from field experience and had seen the effect of good husbandy methods and who cared then whether fertilizers increased yields by 53, 45% or 42, 98%?

In this world of crooks, we were a very nice community, very much scratch my back I will scratch yours. On behalf of the Organization I employed consultants who would develop better and better programs. Most of them became friends. I even employed and discussed statistics with a German Consultant which is rather well done considering that my German is at par with my Father's Dutch and my knowledge of Statistics based on the profound intuition that most facts are either wrong or misunderstood.

In these paragraphs of garbage, you readers are requested to jump next story, I write it donw to get it off my chest, knowing that it will never get off.

I was traveling each day to FAO using a light motorbike, rounding the building, passing next to the computer Office and parking behind the FAO building; One day, early morning as I used like every body else to come one hour before the beginning of the working day to get something done without stress, I saw that someone had left a potato bad under the window of the computer room. I found that to be rather careless and continued until something said in my mind that this was a strange looking potato back, I turned round and looked at the potato bag; Inside the cost there was a lady who had jumped from the seventh floor. Would she have jumped if she had know that the impact would have exploded here intestine outside her body and spread it on her winter coat? She had been a well organized person, leaving her handbad on the top floor with the farewell letters;

Back to Work, but how do you forget?

Computers were slowly taken over by users, a revolution in that well organized rip-off area. Remember tht the Huge computers had no screen you could never see anything.

First we got mini computers that instead of servicing the whole Organization would service the Department and be programmed by the Department. And the results would come within minutes, not within weeks. Still you had to know FORTRAN; But you had a screen

The the first micro computer appeared; it was wonderful, it was the day my life changed again.

When Organizing a Seminar with a hundred participants, if you typed in the list of participant names, nationality, addresses, the desk computer could sort out that list in less than one hour. If you had made an error or if a participant remarked that his name was not AAAAbottt but Fabott, you simply corrected the error and one hour later you would have a new up-to-date list of participants. A wonder! You could even one hour later have the list of participants by nationality and one hour later by specialty. Fantastic! the typing girls did not show the same enthusiasm at that progress.

The first computers were not as small as they like to pretend today; They could memorize up to 2.000 characters. You could even run a regressin analysis, you simply fed in the data in the evening, left a note for the cleaning staff not to switch off the computer and wouahhhh! in the morning you had your regression.

OK, I know you will not believe me, but during my last years at FAO Headquarters I even managed to run matrix analysis, which was rather fun as nobody on the floor knew what a matrix analysis was and I was not stupid enough to tell them how simple it was.

Shell I let out a secret?

All these memories came back when a canadian friend, Nicou, remarked that I appeared to have missed some of the chapters of PSP on how to draw a curve. And it all came back to me.

I was trained in understanding that a computer could not produce an image. When the Desk Computers appeared they had a lot of trouble drawing straight lines and drawing curves was solved by doing staircases that looked like curves.

For years and years to come, Computers would reluctantly help us type our reports (without checking the spelling) but certainly not insert a table or a picture. If you wanted to insert something you had to be good at scissors and glue. Which does not sound very difficult unless you must produce 50 copies of the report. One point was well understood and accepted, never would color have anything to do with computer and computer generated reports; This was for Science Fiction films.

And now I am looking at the dusk and still having difficulties with the drawing of curves.

Life is a laugh, but who is the laughing stock?