Memories of Glen Culler for his Day of Recognition

George Gregg

I want to add my voice to the outpouring of regard and respect for this man of vision who enhanced the lives of so many of us.

I count myself as unbelievably lucky to have stumbled into his orbit in 1968, when I certainly did not appear to be a very promising candidate to become a computer scientist. I was a college drop-out who had spent the previous several years as a road bum in Europe and the Middle East. I had recently arrived in Santa Barbara with my new bride, our sudden marriage and unprecedented propensity to settle down having been occasioned by the imminent arrival of young Gabriel, who was born in July.

As an unemployed new father, I was eligible for a subsidized work program then being operated by the County Welfare office. I was sent to interview for a job under that scheme in the UCSB Computer Center. To my horror, I was selected for the job. (I shared the general antipathy to technology of my counter-culture generation.) The job was called Dispatcher, the duties of which were to carry boxes of paper and mount them on printers, and to match printouts to decks of cards, wrap them with rubber bands and put them in the output boxes.

The computer had only recently been upgraded from the 360/50 to a 360/65. Dr. Culler had previously been in charge of both the Computer Center and the Computer Research Lab, but Chuck Loepkey by that time had come on board as Director of the Computer Center.

The computer operator for whom I worked much preferred to spend his days in the operator's lounge reading science fiction, so I was left on my own to operate the computer, annoying him from time to time with questions. After a month of this, the questions became rare. Then one day he called in and quit, with no notice. After several days of consternation, while the Computer Center tried to figure out how to get a new operator quickly in the face of the usual glacial pace of the Personnel Department, it occurred to someone to ask how the computer was being operated in the meantime. When they learned that I had been running the computer for a week with no problems, they decided to make me a computer operator.

As the junior operator, I was immediately assigned to the midnight shift. This was where I met all the wierdos and computer junkies, including the Computer Research Lab programmers who were working on the Culler-Fried system. These were my kind of people. I went home and told my wife that I had found the job for me. I wanted to be a programmer. They wore jeans and sandals, came and went as they pleased, and were paid a fortune for having fun. The only problem was I had no idea how to become a programmer, so I started out by reading the IBM manuals in the technical library. I had plenty of time for this, because the graveyard shift consisted of occasionally starting a long job and then watching the tape drives slowly turn.

I learned assembly language from the reference manual. I didn't know that no one in his/her right mind would ever actually read the IBM reference manuals. In blissful ignorance of what a ridiculous approach it was, I systematically plowed through the manuals in the reference library. However, I did learn about obscure instructions and operating system features that nobody else knew about.

One night Ron Stoughton worked most of the night trying to write a program that would print out all of the names of the modules that made up the Culler-Fried system on sticky labels. These resided in a kind of file that IBM called a "partitioned data set." Ron gave up and went home about 5:00 in the morning. Of course the sensible thing would have been to give the list to a secretary and ask for the names to be typed on labels. However, that would have been far too low-tech for Ron.

I had read in a manual about a utility that would print the names of the members of a partitioned data set, but this would be a standard report not formatted for labels. I ran the utility and directed the output to a file, then wrote a little program to read the file and format the names for labels. I printed the labels and put them in Ron's box.

The next night Ron was waiting for me when I came to work at midnight. He told me that we were going to have a meeting with Dr. Culler the next morning. I had heard a lot about Dr. Culler, but I had never met him. The next morning, I felt as if I was being ushered before the high priest. Dr. Culler asked me a few questions, and then to my astonishment offered me a job with the Computer Research Lab. He didn't care that I had no degree and no computer training.

Being offered the chance to join the Computer Research Lab was the greatest opportunity of my life. Dr. Culler was an inspiring leader of a diverse high-morale group of hardworking dedicated young programmers. He used us to help him push the frontiers of what could be done with computers. He was in love with what he was doing. His ideas seemed to flow endlessly from an inexhaustible source that can only be called genius.

I had a fantastic two years working in the most exciting environment imaginable. The most significant of the CRL projects that I was involved with was when we were selected to participate in the development of a new method of computer communications called packet switching. The original network based on these protocols was ARPANET, which ultimately became the Internet. We were the first of the original four sites (UCLA, Stanford, Utah, and UCSB) to send and receive packets. Sadly, Dr. Culler was out of action with health problems at the time of this milestone. The Acting Director of the Computer Research Lab at that time was Dr. David Harris from the Chemistry Department. I can't remember how long Dr. Culler was away, but I think it was many months.

I left CRL before he returned. Over the years since, I have frequently reflected on those heady times, and on the talented and sometimes oddball characters that I was privileged to work with. Dr. Culler's style of leadership has been a model for me of how to motivate technical staff, stimulate creativity, allow exploration, and get incredible productive output from people. Working for him was a life-changing experience for me. I'm proud and grateful to have had a small part in his accomplishments.

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