This note is about my formative teen years (in
the late '60s) hanging out at the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth. The
first part gives my recollection of the overall situation and the last part
describes my personal experience.
I'm probably one of the few survivors of that era
that still gives a shit about it.
THE BUILDING
Kiewit was built with money donated by Peter
Kiewit & Sons, a Canadian mining and construction company. It's a company
well-known for being an environmental destroyer. This is an unusually clear
example of the link between high-tech and environmental destruction.
Kiewit was located in the center of the campus.
Its front doors faced the entrance to frat row and the mammoth Baker Library
was next door on another side. It was a white, rectangular one-story building.
It had an intentionally outlandish Stonehenge-like design. I believe it was
built in '66. There are a number of exterior and interior photos available
online.
The main computer housed at Kiewit was the GE-625
mainframe. It ran DTSS, one of the first time-sharing systems ever developed.
This kind of system allows multiple users to use a computer at the same time.
The mission of the facility was to popularize and democratize computer use.
THE SOUL OF THE MACHINE
The leading lights of the place were Tom Kurtz,
John Kemeny and professors Garland & Hargraves. All the software
development grunt work was done by the undergraduate SysProgs.
Each SysProg was known by the system component he
was responsible for. The ones I remember were:
Andy Behrens-BASIC compiler, Steve Reiss-625 assembler
& MIX interpreter, Tony Dwyer-DTSS executive & Background
monitor, Ron Harris-DDT debugger, Dave Relson-Algol60 compiler, Mike
Rubens-Opmon operator monitor, Eric Larsen-SIMON simple monitor.
I've forgotten the name of the guy who did the FORTRAN compiler, unfortunately.
GROUND FLOOR
Machine Room
The machine room housed the big-ass mainframe
GE-625 computer. It was in the center of the building and had floor-to-ceiling
glass walls on two sides so that all and sundry could stand and gawk at all the
wondrous equipment and little blinking lights.
TTY Room
The TTY room was a big open space at one end of
the building. It was for the students' use. It contained 16 Model 35 TTY's.
These TTY's were slow and clunky. They used big rolls of yellow-paper.
There were two banks of TTY cubicles, one on each
side of the room. Each bank had two rows of 4 cubicles, each row facing the
other. Each cubicle had a wide shelf/counter on one side, usually the left, to
put your work materials on. The cubicle partitions were only 3 feet high so you
could easily talk to the people around you.
In the center of the room, between the two banks
of TTY cubicles were two big white-topped tables (with light, metal-frame
chairs) for the students to spread their program listings out on so they could
read and revise them.
There was a long blackboard all along the inner
wall of the room for students to use in discussing their programming ideas and
problems.
There was a small kitchenette for the staff
behind a tall, heavy white door near the TTY room.
Library
The library was a medium-sized room located off
the hallway between the front door and the TTY room. It was a cool, quiet place
to hang out in. My favorite memory of it is those times I passed by when Tony
Dwyer and some of the other SysProgs and students were loudly and merrily
playing a game of Bridge. It wasn't long before the librarian asked them to
re-locate their noisy game to the conference room next door.
Vending Machines
Right inside the rear door to Kiewit, and right
next to the stairs leading down to the basement, was a small vending machine
area. I used to get Fanta root beer and Twinkies. The root beer was pretty
nasty, it was so sweet and cloying. Fresca, a sugarless grapefruit-flavored
soda, was better but still nasty in its own way. I got kinda sick of Twinkies
after a while, too.
BASEMENT
Storage Area
When I first started going to Kiewit almost half
the basement was just a big open space that was used to store leftover building
construction material and computer stuff.
SysProgs Room
The SysProgs room was at the bottom of the
stairs. It had a door at each end. As you came in the first door there were
desks along the right wall as well as in the center of the room. Above the
desks on the right were deep storage cupboards. There were floor-to-ceiling
shelves all along the left wall. There were two partitioned-off TTYs, one in
each corner on the right side.
Program Listings
The shelves on the left side of the SysProgs room
tended to be totally full of huge fan-fold listings of assembly-language
implementations of system components, e.g., FORTRAN compiler, Basic compiler,
etc. A felt-tip pen was used to write the name of the given program in big
block letters along the side of each huge stack of paper. In terms of size, the FORTRAN compiler must
have been at least two feet tall. FORTRAN was one of the biggest, I think only
the DTSS exec was bigger. In contrast, the TRAC interpreter was only a piddling
inch. And while the Basic compiler was entirely written at Dartmouth I believe
the FORTRAN compiler was ported from another system, possibly GE's GECOS.
Sci-Fi Library
A block of pigeon-hole type mailboxes was
attached to the wall on your immediate right as you entered the SysProgs Room.
On top of these mail-boxes was a collection of used sci-fi novels left there
for anyone to borrow. They included Isaac Asimov's excellent, "Foundation
Trilogy", and some H.P. Lovecraft books.
Datanet-30 Room
Next to the SysProgs room was the Datanet-30
room. The Datanet-30's provided the communication link between the TTYs and the
mainframe. The Datanet-30 room was noisy and cold due to the heavy A/C.
The PDP-9 Room
Next to the Datanet-30 room was the PDP-9 room.
This room contained a small mini-computer about the size of two player-pianos
placed side by side. The PDP-8 model was a fairly standard model sold by the
Digital Equipment Corp. at that time. The model in the basement was a
"9" instead of an "8" because of an additional oscilloscope
unit. The oscilloscope screen looked like a large round green pane of glass.
SPACEWAR!
The only thing I ever did with the PDP-9 was to
play the world's first video game, “SPACEWAR!”, a few times. This was a
two-player game that used the PDP-9 oscilloscope to display two small space
ships, a sun in the center and a star-field background. There were two control
units for playing the game. Each control unit had 8 push-buttons on it. The
game consisted of two small spaceships trying to blow each other up by firing
missiles at each other. The buttons on the control unit controlled your ship's
speed, direction, missile firing and space warp. You had to try and avoid the
sun at the center of the screen or you'd blow up. I never got that into this
game, but when I brought two of my high school buddies up to play it once they
ended up staying up all night until 6am playing it, wildly enthusiastic. There
are some photos and videos available of it online.
BATHROOMS
There was one on each floor. They were unusually
small and cramped. The walls were tiled with tiny half-inch-square tiles that
were a sort of ugly mustard/urine color.
The doors on the stalls featured gravity hinges,
something I'd never seen before. The door hinges had to travel up and down an
inch-high spiral groove.
The sinks and mirrors were placed unusually low
on the wall. Graffiti under one of the mirrors in the upstairs bathroom
bitched about "Kiewit's midget minions". Each letter of the graffiti
message was written on a separate little yellow tile. It was the only graffiti
in the whole building and it was never removed.
LLOYD KELLY, BOY GENIUS
It all started for me when I was a freshman in
high school in the fall of '68. Lloyd Kelly, closet-case & boy genius, was
my best friend (God help me). We were both freshmen at Lebanon High and at that
time the freshman class was still being taught in the junior high building on
Bank St. Lloyd learned of the availability of the computer system when he went
to the high school building on Hanover St. to play saxophone in the weekly
school band practice. While there he happened to discover a DTSS TTY in a small
storage room. Its presence there was part of a community outreach type thing,
of course.
One of my classmates, a guy called Dave, had a
lot more enthusiasm for it than I did. I remember him painstakingly typing in a
program he'd written for playing a race-car game. The idea didn't appeal to me
but Dave was always a real go-getter. And I've always been a bit of a human
slug.
I remember the first few times I tried to read
the intro Basic programming language booklet. It contained a simple example
program for finding the square roots of numbers. I tried to read it and my eyes
glazed. That was to be the story of my whole career in high-tech,
unfortunately.
It wasn't long before Lloyd and I had stopped
dicking around in the Lebanon High storage closet and went to visit the source:
Kiewit in Hanover. Hanover was only 3 or 4 miles from where we lived.
When I first started going to Kiewit it was like
a sci-fi wonderland. The building had just been built. Everything was so new,
bright, shiny, clean. The whole place had that new-building smell.
Banned from the SysProgs Room!
Lloyd and I began to spend all our free time at
Kiewit. Lloyd was always a very pushy and abrasive character so after a few
months one of the main SysProgs, Andy Behrens, got fed up and started a
petition to get Lloyd and I banned from the SysProgs room. I was hugely
indignant at this action and wanted to wash my hands of the place permanently.
I remember boycotting the live television broadcast of the first Apollo moon
landing because of this. On that momentous evening I stood with Lloyd up the
hallway by the vending machines in Kiewit while a group of students crowded
around in front of a TV in the TTY room. We heard them cheer when the landing
was accomplished. Fuck them and their fucking moon.
Andy graciously explained to me later why the
SysProgs found Lloyd so insufferable. It wasn't just that Lloyd was so pushy
with his opinions it was that his opinions were usually correct. Heh.
Programming Projects
Lloyd and I were allowed to come back to Kiewit
on the condition that we undertake programming projects in order to make
ourselves useful and to keep us out from under foot. Steve Reiss kindly
volunteered to be a sort of coach to us. He was only a year or two older than
we were. He had become a freshman at Dartmouth at age 16.
I was initially given the job of converting the
TRAC language interpreter from Phase IV to Phase V of DTSS. Even though it was
a fairly easy task I just couldn’t get it off the ground. It was given to Lloyd
instead and he quickly took it over and aced it. After that, he completely
re-wrote the OpMon monitor, as well; quite a feather in his fucking cap.
This early failure of mine deeply affected me. A
few years later, in '76, I tried to redeem myself by writing a TRAC program for
pretty-printing TRAC programs but I gave it up when I realized there was no
universal solution for rendering a given program's layout both regular and
concise. And again, in '82, I further worked to redeem myself by implementing a
Prolog language interpreter as my C.S. Masters project at UNH. This last
project panned out fairly well for me.
But back in '69, having failed at my TRAC
assignment, I was given a replacement project which was to implement something
called a Tree Climbing Dump program. The program was almost completely written
by Tony Dwyer, all I had to do was implement a simple command-line style
interface on the front end. It was slow, boring work but I eventually slogged
my way through it. I did have the small satisfaction of accidently crashing the
entire DTSS system because of a bug in my program.
Sex & Drugs
Eric Larsen, one of the SysProgs, was an
easy-going, laid-back kind of guy. In '71, when I started getting into pot and
LSD, he let Lloyd and I use the bathroom in his apartment one night to shoot up
LSD (another one of Lloyd's screwy ideas). Eric thought we wanted to use it to
have sex, ha ha. After we came out of his bathroom he was disgusted to learn we
had shot up instead. As for Lloyd and I having sex, I resisted all his various
attempts over the years to rope me into that, with one minor exception. I guess
I just wasn't queer enough. But I can't help but wonder how many SysProgs and
students Lloyd did manage to 'get lucky' with. Dartmouth was an all-male school
at that time and Lloyd was a pretty bold guy.
Suicide
Eric Larsen had an incurable liver condition, I
believe. I remember him walking down the back hallway in Kiewit once, loudly
singing that, "They're gonna crucify me!", song by John Lennon. A
year or so later he committed suicide by going out on the local golf course one
night, lying down under some bushes and taking an overdose of barbiturates.
Mental Illness & Death
Lloyd never did come out and explicitly admit to
me he was gay. I stopped hanging out with him in '71 and I saw less and less of
him after that. He ended up going a little bonkers in the late-70s, who knows
why. He'd been drinking heavily for years and he told me once that he
over-indulged in nitrous oxide so much that he'd developed a spot of frostbite
on the roof of his mouth. He died some years ago. He was only 42. Due to liver
problems, they say. Good riddance, I says. The guy was brutal, a monster. And
if I wasn't such a fucking slug I wouldn't have let him commandeer my life.
Sidekick
I wrote to Tony Dwyer a year ago and asked him if
he remembered me. He responded, "Yes, you were Lloyd Kelly's sidekick,
right?" Right. Thanks, Tony.
DEMOLITION
Last time I saw Kiewit was in the early '00s. It
had just been demolished and there was nothing left but a big hole in the
ground. I believe Dartmouth has, over the years, always worked hard to maintain
its strong commitment to computer-oriented high-tech teaching and research. Not
that I give a rat's ass. If it were up to me I'd nuke the whole fucking campus
straight to fuckin' Hell. "Vox clamantis in deserto", my ass.
WARM & TENDER LOVE
So, let science and technology wrap you in its
warm and tender love.
