Random Musings

Winter is a few days away but this morning

was 47 degrees Fahrenheit or 8.3333 Celsius take your pick. The water temperature at my boat is 60 degrees F and though the water is much warmer that the air it does not heat the interior of my cabin. In the past I never thought I would be come an Eskimo and live on an iceberg.



There are ten windows on my Ericson and they don't provide much insulation against the outside air and the wind when it is blowing as it is now. When you live in a building unless it is a tornado or hurricane you can't sense the wind and its direction. On a boat the wind moves you around and if I look around anything hanging will be swinging around. After living here for several years I have become unaware of the movements. Last night my main halyard started to slap and it banged all night long.

If I turn on my idiot box on in the morning the local news is filled with traffic reports and freeway congestion. WTF I ride a bicycle and today I will wait for more sunshine before pedaling. Yesterday afternoon I rode my fake fixie to the market and almost got knocked over by a cross wind. I only watch the weather on TV to look at  the cute weather ladies and weekends KTLA is the best in the west.

Paddling before wind started

My son has always been involved in taking videos and started filming while sitting on his skateboard. Not sure how many cameras he has wasted. His YouTube channel is entertaining and I often read the comments.


One comment mentioned Live Stream and being from the old school computer ice age I knew nothing of that but it takes only a few keystrokes to make me another Google knower genius.
Live Stream was pedaling (not a bicycle but selling) a Mevo which after searching I found there was another electronic device I couldn't live without if I had Donald's money.

Somehow we are being buried by all this new technology. This cave-in caused a short circuit in my synaptic vault (probably too much orange juice) and I suddenly remember how to wire up the options on a Ma Bell 201A Modem. Myself and my boss Steve Young were attempting to attach a modem to the RJE terminal we were building. The Pacific Telephone employee dropped it off at our office and gave us the manual which since there wasn't any YouTube available then we had to read it.

We bought ten Potter Line Printers (total POS)

After we got the modem attached we tried to communicate with an IBM mainframe at Long Beach Douglas. After a day of scopes, screwdrivers and wire wrapping tools and some key punching we made contact. The RJE terminal we were building was a knock off of an IBM 2780. Steve had been working on the design for over two years. Stevegot a million shares of stock and I got an option. He was a millionaire on paper that still saved his paper lunch bags and my stock option went up in smoke when the company (Data Computer Systems) went broke after five years.

I installed a system in St. Louis

An RJE terminal (remote job entry) allows a job (computer program) to be transmitted to a large computer where the job is processed on the computer and the results (data) is sent back to the RJE terminal where the information is printed out on paper or punched on cards.

We put all of our electronics including power supplies in Wright Line Cabinets

All that would fit on a finger nail now.

An example of one of our early installations was at a Boeing Factory outside of Philly. The terminal (our CP4) was placed in an Engineering department and it sent data back and forth using a modem to the computer in another building. The factory was making helicopters for Vietnam War. To sign on in today's world you make a few keystrokes and login. Then you punched a sign-in card added your JCL cards and placed them in the hopper on the card reader. You used the telephone to dial the number of the modem at the computer site and after you made a valid connection you pushed the start key on the terminal then you pushed the start key on the card reader. The information on the punched cards were then sent to the computer to be processed. After batch processing the process was reserved.

This is very similar to our CP4

Things have changed since that time when we needed to use a moving van to install one of our systems which included the card reader/punch, processor and line printer. More that once I did installs where there were not any elevators or the moving van gone stuck in a snow storm.

We used Honeywell printers and reader/punch

Somewhere is my daughters garage there are some pictures of our CP4 and the project that didn't make me rich.

LITTLE SCARLET by William Mosley

This is my fifth read of an Easy Rawlins novel. This story takes place in Los Angeles in August 1965. The Watts riots started on the 11th of August at Avalon and 116th Street (which really isn't in Watts) when Marquette Frye was pulled over by the California Highway Officer Lee W. Minkus for a DUI. Apparently the arrest was going down without any conflict until Rena Price, Fyre mother got involved and things got very out of hand. After five days of "Burn, baby ,burn" where Easy stayed at his home in "West L.A." he returned to his office where on the ground floor Steinman's Shoe Repair has been destroyed.

Where I grew up in Santa Monica West L.A. was centered around Sawtelle Blvd and I used to hang out at a automotive shop there that was ran by a Japanese fellow and he used to race midgets.The district's general boundaries are the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) on the south, and the borders with the neighborhoods of Century City (Century Park West) and Rancho Park on the west. The northern border of the portion of West L.A. that is east of the I-405 is Santa Monica Boulevard (north of which is Westwood). The Los Angeles Times in it decription of the counties neighborhoods has another description. So where West L.A. is may differ between Angelenos.
Mosely uses West L.A. as the location around the May Company on Wilshire.

He goes to the Miller Neurological at La Cienega and Wilshire in West L.A. Here is one description:

Page 12, Detective Suggs drives a Ramber Marlin.

That car was manufactured in 1965 and was a AMC high end sporty model with a fastback roof. "It is my ex." is Suggs reply to Easy in regards to the seat belts installed. Wonder why Suggs isn't driving an LAPD unit. 

Page 40, Bonnie Shay's car is a new pink Rambler.

(somebody must have been a big Romney fan). There is also a sailboat in the driveway that belongs to Jesus. 

Page 55, "Cops chased Marlon Jones up into the White Front Department Store on Central," The exact address before the store was destroyed was 7651 South Central. Its always interesting to run across the old businesses in these detective novels. The first furtinure I ever purchased was at a White Front in the Valley. Later when I lived by Disneyland we shopped at White Front on Harbor Blvd. in Anaheim.

Page 164, Jackson is speaking to Easy, "I know the IBM languages called BAL and COBOL and FORTRAN. I know all the loops and peripheries and the JCL too." FORTRAN was developed by IBM but COBOL was not. It was created by Grace Hopper using an UNIVAC.

BAL is basic assembly and JCL is Job Control. In 1965 the most popular IBM was the 1401 and later in the year the first Model 360 was introduced. The 1401 used SPS (Symbolic Programming System) and RPG (Report Program Generator). Most people have no idea how small the storage was and how large it was physical. The 1401 basic unit had 1,600 memory locations.

 







The first core memory that I worked on had 256 locations and the electronics took up one side of the chassis. It has read amp circuit cards, write amps, and sense amps and lots of colorful wiring.

Easy is searching for "Harold" and Harold has several different last names so he recruits Bonnie to place telephone calls asking for Harold or his mother. "But maybe they're in the valley or down around Santa Monica. Maybe you could call those numbers." Page 236. Later Bonnie has left a message on the tape message that Jackson installed in Easy's office, "I think I have something. I called a J. Ostenberg in Pasadena. A man named Simon Poundstone answered". Both Suggs (page 239) and Mouse drive to the valley to find Harold's mother and her maid. Page 238, "I got J. OSTENBERG's address out of the phone book.

Page 240, "Jocelyn Ostenberg lived in a nice house on Hesby Street off of Muerretta Avenue" Those streets are indeed in the SF Valley not Pasadena and are actually located in Sherman Oaks and the correct spelling of the Avenue only has one "r" not two. So how did Bonnie find the house in the valley when she said it was in Pasadena?

Page 249, Raymond meets Easy and Mouse has a golden Continental. "A brand-new car."

Third new car in the book, must have been a good year for car dealers. In regards to cars of that period the LAPD police patrol unit was a Plymouth Belvedere 4 door. In 1972-1973 the LAPD used a AMC Matador for patrol.