Circa 1983
I recently shared about my first article ever published; this post is about my second article. But don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a series — I have no idea what my third article was or where it was published.
Although I had promised I would never ever write again after my first agonizing piece, when I saw my work in print, I quickly forgot about the painful birthing experience. In a few short weeks, I was again writing.
At the time, computers were emerging as accessible, viable tools. I was taking a computer class to learn Fortran. (A few years later, I would work briefly as a programmer for Amtelco, coding call center switch controllers using the esoteric language of polyFORTH. But I digress.)
Without going into boring detail, I ended up using the College's computer lab to write a program to do some number crunching regarding radio station interference; it was an intense program. This was in the days of mainframes; the computer lab assistant observed my program continuously sucking up all the computer resources that it was allocated — so he gave me more!
Then he came to investigate. Once he determined that I was not involved in a frivolous misuse of computer resources, he completely removed my limit and soon my program was hogging 96% of all available processing power. Twenty-three other people in the lab simultaneously groaned and gave him dirty looks. But my program was flying! Wisely he set my limit down — to 50% (it was originally at 4%). Soon my program finished its work and I printed out the results.
Eventually, I wrote an article about it called, "Computers Track Down Intermodulation Interference"; it was published in Mobile Radio Technology magazine. The editors were quite excited and even sent a photographer to snap some pictures. To save you the trouble of downloading the PDF file, here is the photo they used (circa 1983). This was all pretty heady stuff for a wet-behind-the-ears techno-geek.
By the way, in case you were wondering, the program worked great, but the reams of output brought us no closer to figuring our the cause of the interference. As programmers say, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), but at least I got an article out of the deal!
Although I had promised I would never ever write again after my first agonizing piece, when I saw my work in print, I quickly forgot about the painful birthing experience. In a few short weeks, I was again writing.
At the time, computers were emerging as accessible, viable tools. I was taking a computer class to learn Fortran. (A few years later, I would work briefly as a programmer for Amtelco, coding call center switch controllers using the esoteric language of polyFORTH. But I digress.)
Without going into boring detail, I ended up using the College's computer lab to write a program to do some number crunching regarding radio station interference; it was an intense program. This was in the days of mainframes; the computer lab assistant observed my program continuously sucking up all the computer resources that it was allocated — so he gave me more!
Then he came to investigate. Once he determined that I was not involved in a frivolous misuse of computer resources, he completely removed my limit and soon my program was hogging 96% of all available processing power. Twenty-three other people in the lab simultaneously groaned and gave him dirty looks. But my program was flying! Wisely he set my limit down — to 50% (it was originally at 4%). Soon my program finished its work and I printed out the results.
Eventually, I wrote an article about it called, "Computers Track Down Intermodulation Interference"; it was published in Mobile Radio Technology magazine. The editors were quite excited and even sent a photographer to snap some pictures. To save you the trouble of downloading the PDF file, here is the photo they used (circa 1983). This was all pretty heady stuff for a wet-behind-the-ears techno-geek.
By the way, in case you were wondering, the program worked great, but the reams of output brought us no closer to figuring our the cause of the interference. As programmers say, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), but at least I got an article out of the deal!
Posted by Peter DeHaan at 2/1/2008 7:09 PM 
Categories: Publishing, Computers, Writing
Tags: computer programming Fortran Peter DeHaan blog author Peter DeHaan Peter DeHaan Musings Musings of Peter DeHaan
Categories: Publishing, Computers, Writing
Tags: computer programming Fortran Peter DeHaan blog author Peter DeHaan Peter DeHaan Musings Musings of Peter DeHaan
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