LOL I joined IBM Research in Yorktown in 1978. I was an electrical engineer and one of the first problems I was given was modeling a novel concept for an X-Y touch panel. I realized that the model is basically solving Laplace's equation in the plane. I was not a programmer at the time, so I asked what was the recommended thing for that. I was told APL, so I grabbed a manual and got to work. Within a day or two I had a nice solver working and was getting useful results. (Of course, solving Laplace in the plane by relaxation is the slowest possible way to get to the answer, but I didn't know much about numerical methods back in those days.) The next week I got a visit from the same IT weenies who had bothered you. They told me that in my first week on the job I had managed to be the biggest consumer of CPU cycles on the 370/168 and that I had to learn to program in PL/I because compiled was better than interpreted. It took me several weeks to get it working, since PL/I was such a pain in the neck and I had to learn all sorts of stuff about how numbers were represented in the hardware. Obviously my time was worth less than the computer's. Bleh. ===== nygeek.net mindthegapdialogs.com/home On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 4:43 PM Charles H Sauer (he/him) < sauer@technologists.com> wrote: > Early on in my career at IBM Yorktown, ca. 1976, I was submitting many > long running simulation jobs to the 360/91 there. At one point, the head > of computer systems (I.T. if you will) wrote to the head of computer > sciences (my department) complaining that I had just spent $50K over > some short period, asking if this was justified. My management shrugged > it off, encouraged me to continue what I was doing. I might still have > the letter somewhere. > > A couple of years later, while on the faculty at U.T. Austin, one of the > main budgetary items in research grant proposals was purchase of > mini-computers, assuming those were a more efficient use of funds than > paying for time at the campus computing center (then using CDC 6600 and > successors). > > COFF? > > Charlie > > On 8/9/2022 3:19 PM, Warner Losh wrote: > > > Computing budgets were tiny: You had only so many $$$ for your runs and > > if you made > > too many, you'd run out of $$$ before you were done (more applicable as > > a student than > > as a professional post school though). Consequently your time was > > plentiful and > > computer time was scarce. > > -- > voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer@technologists.com > fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ > Facebook/Google/Twitter > : CharlesHSauer >