CRL, as I recall...

Dave Retz

Here are some of my notes on the CRL experience ...

I arrived at UCSB on a late Friday afternoon in July, 1967 and wandered into the third floor of the Engineering building upon the recommendation of a janitor, who said: "that's where the computers are." I discovered a group of people huddled around a small storage oscilloscope with waveforms showing up on the display and sounds coming out of a Bose speaker; sounds like, "Hello ....".

Aside from the apparent break-through of the day (getting a computer to talk), what was impressive was the enthusiasm of the group. I didn't open my mouth, but fortunately, one member of the group turned to me and introduced himself as Glen Culler. I wasted no time in telling him that I was a new graduate student in Chemistry and was looking for a programming job. Gleefully, he said: "That's great! We just received a contract to connect a mass spectrometer in the chemistry department with the on-line system." So, one of the fortunate turns in my life was getting a job working for Glen. (This was one of those times I was really lucky the RW-400 hadn't just crashed before I walked in the door.)

What was really impressive about Glen was his ability to look at an objective without being overwhelmed by apparent difficulties in achieving it. This "can-do" attitude fostered an atmosphere of creativity in the group known as the "Computer Research Lab." The attitude provided the drive for unabashedly striving for exciting goals that were actually difficult jobs in their day.

In retrospect, I think that the development of the original 1965-vintage RW-400 online system was an impressive achievement. The hardware was flaky (early day fuzzy-logic germanium transistor flip-flops combined with drum storage devices from Alzheimer Peripherals Corp.), so the hardware folks (Gordon Buck, Ray Bjorkman, Dennis Grubbs and, later on, Larry Pfeifer) were kept busy swapping spares. Software tools didn't really exist; code was keyed in in octal via home-grown debugging software -- without compilers or even an assembler. In spite of this, the mathematical online system worked -- and even processed speech using the IBM 1800 as a real-time I/O controller. The RW-400 provided the case in point, while Glen and the team laughed in the face of the obstacles.

The migration of the Culler-Fried online system to IBM's new OS/360 operating system had its own new hurdles: the software was buggy, rigid, and the batch environment was such that it was best to work the night shift. In those days, IBM products weren't exactly "open" systems, and interfacing new graphics and high-speed data communications hardware also provided many a cause for "all-nighters." The /360 version of the system also brought with it a new dimension: larger numbers of production users and support problems that went with them. I remember this transition as difficult -- but it happened -- and provided the foundation for UCSB to be one of the first four operating Hosts on the ARPANET. During the difficult times there were many meetings when Glen would provide the its-really-possible attitude.

Glen abounded with new ideas on almost a daily basis (appearing on the 3rd floor around 5AM to try them out). If you showed up early, you would receive an earful over a couple of cups of coffee. The conversation would begin with him saying "Wouldn't it be neat if ...." Some of the ideas were far-reaching, while others mundane. I remember a quality problem in the early "teleputer" keyboards, and Glen came up with a new design for keyboard switches. This was a hot topic for a couple of months, and there were a few prototypes of Glens own "button" assembled; but Microswitch came out with a new switch design that solved the problem (thankfully).

Some of the computer center users had asked for a way of writing programs in Fortran (the programming language of the masses in the early '60s). Glen came up with an idea for an interface between the Culler-Fried system and the batch approach, allowing users to exchange data between the interactive side of the system and traditional Fortran programs. The so-called "Fortran Window" was an interesting marriage of the different computing approaches.

As many people are aware, Glen came up with an interesting variation of analyzing and representing speech waveforms; a lot of his activity provided the foundation for research on speech compression and recognition at UCSB. I was grateful for his direction to allow use of the next generation in computer technology, the minicomputer, as a platform for a small online system for processing of speech.

Here's a few more of Glen's not-so-famous ideas that I can recall: use of an etch-a-sketch pad as a low-cost computer graphics output device; use of stepper motors with a mechanical arm to draw graphics on a chalk-board; a high-speed (2 Mbps) data link for collection of chemical instrumentation for processing with the online system; a cross-campus infrared laser data communication system; an interactive source editing facility as part of the online system that supported batch submission (named "Card Oriented Language" after the 80-column IBM cards of the day).

Aside from his technical innovations, probably Glen's most impressive characteristic was his Pied-Piper style of motivation and inspiration.

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