Their Fucking Moon

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.