Chapter 8: Living with Janelle

Learning to Live Together

April, 1981

April was quite busy; we performed two or three gigs around Sydney every week; the tracks chosen for the single were ‘Walking Home’ on the A side, and ‘Nutbush’ as the B side. I didn’t mind not being the lead vocalist on either track; as George said, the latest trend was having powerful female rock singers was just starting to take off internationally, and he felt we could get ahead of the others. Record sales – for both the single and the album – were promising; our gigs were sold out each night.

For the first evening of our renewed ‘date night’ meals, Mary Beth called me just before 5:00, saying she was about to leave work. I had determined it would take me about fifteen minutes to walk down to the Thai restaurant on Anzac Parade, so I finished what I was working on before leaving. I arrived a minute or two before Mary Beth, and we were shown to a table. We started talking about our respective days, and just as the meals arrived, she asked the question that I was sure she would ask me.

“After what we talked about regarding Janelle last week, what made you decide to have her move in with you?” she asked.

“Well, both you and Garry were saying that a problem was I needed to get that intimacy between Janelle and me; everything was just sex at the moment. Her crazy shift schedule certainly didn’t help, there aren’t all that many times when we can get to see each other, and when we would ... we would have sex. We thought that if she spent some time during each week living with me, we would have more time together. Time to develop our relationship, time to see how we go living together, sharing a place together.”

“Well, that makes sense,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of having her living in the house; Up till now, I’ve been the only woman, even that damn Fred is a male. I’ve been way outnumbered!”

Actually, I hadn’t really thought of Janelle moving in with me in that light, at least not until that morning, when I woke up by myself for the first time in a few days. But it did seem to make sense to me, even if I was justifying my actions after the event.

“You know Garry is thinking about having Jenny move in with him, too,” she said. “That would make six of us in the house. Well, seven, with Fred.”

“That would be good for him; he’s been down in the dumps ever since he and Jill broke up, and that was a while ago.”

“Yeah. Now, do you think Janelle will move in full time? Or will you just keep it for the weekends?”

“Well, I’m getting a second phone line put in to our room, so she can be contacted by the hospital. She is on call all the time, if they need her to fill in a position of someone’s sick. We will see how things go; if it’s too inconvenient for her, then we’ll try something else, I guess. But if it all works out, then she will move in fully by the end of April.”

We kept talking until we had finished our meal, then it was time to head up to our respective lectures; me to deliver mine, and Mary Beth to sit in hers and learn. As we entered the main gate of the University, Mary Beth took hold of my hand, and we continued up the main walkway hand in hand. I didn’t say anything, but just smiled to myself; it felt nice with her warm hand in mine.

After I had finished the lecture and tutorial, I was finishing up some notes in my office, waiting for her to get to my office after her lecture. While I was waiting, I started going through the tutorial assignments the class had handed in this evening. Mary Beth arrived after a few minutes, I put the papers away in a desk drawer. I would finish grading them in the morning. As we walked back to my parking space, she slipped her arm around my waist, so I did the same with her. As we drove back home, she reached across to hold my hand.

“I hope you don’t mind me holding your hand,” she said. “I’m not trying to suggest we do anything further, I know your rules and I respect them. It’s just that I feel emotionally close to you, and I like holding your hand. It reinforces the intimacy we have, Will.”

“I like it too, Mary Beth. I like walking arm in arm with you, too.”

“Yeah ... it’s so nice. Why the fuck my stupid sister left you, I have no idea. She’s an idiot, that’s all I can say. If things had been different, and we had got together those couple of years ago ... I never would have let you get away from me. And instead of Chris and me getting married the other month, it would have been you and me. Would you have wanted that?”

Well ... we are both as stubborn as bulls, and if we were married, we would probably fight like hell,” I said. “But in between the fighting ... it would be nice.”

“In between the fighting it would be very nice,” she said, reaching across to squeeze my hand. “It’s never going to happen, but it’s a nice thought at times. Don’t get me wrong, things are still great between Chris and me, but ... I can’t help but think about what it would have been like with you.”

As the students were leaving the lecture theatre after the next Monday morning’s Computing I lecture, Michael and Sarah stopped to ask if they could see me in my office later that day. I told them I would be there all day; except between 12 and 1. I had resumed my work out sessions down at the gym; I had noticed my body getting a little ‘soft’. Since I had stopped riding my bike regularly from home (at Erskineville!) to the University, I had started to put on a little weight. Not that I was getting fat or anything, but I had noticed I no longer had the same stamina for a long day’s sailing. I settled on three days a week – Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – in the gym, working on muscle strength and flexibility, and the other two lunchtimes I would run laps around the University oval.

The two of them came to see me about halfway through the afternoon, they knocked on door of my office, and I told them to take a seat.

“What is it you wanted to see me about?” I asked.

“Well ... I was wondering if it would be possible...” Sarah started to say. “It’s not that important, really, we just were hoping I could change my tutorial class, to be in your class.”

“I guess we can do that,” I said. “Any reason why? Who’s you current tutor? Is there a problem with him?”

“No, there’s no problem, Mr. Rose – Greg is a great tutor, explains things very clearly,” she said. “It’s just that, well ... I would like to be in the same class as Michael. You probably think I’m being silly for asking that.”

“No, you’re not being silly at all, I know what it’s like to be in love with someone. Let me just check the class lists.”

I went out to the main office and pulled out the two tutorial class folders from the filing cabinets. Greg’s reports on her were all positive; she seemed to be a good, solid student. I went back into my office, and sat down.

“I can’t see a problem with that,” I said. “I’ll check it over with Greg, make sure he knows why, and I’ll get all of his notes about your assignments. A word of warning though; don’t expect my tutorial classes to be easy...”

“He’s really tough,” Michael said. “Mr Morris expects that you’ve read stuff, actually done the assignments, done your homework. He asks pretty hard questions...”

“Yeah, Mr Rose is like that, too. And he’s so tall, that if you don’t know the answers, he stands over you. So intimidating!”

“Okay, consider yourself transferred, Sarah, unless I tell you otherwise. Now, that’s not an excuse for the two of you to sit up the back of my tutorial class and kiss and carry on.”

They both went bright red.

“We wouldn’t do that...” Michael stammered.

“No! Not in public!” Sarah protested.

“Just teasing. Is there anything else you need from me?”

All they wanted was or Sarah to change tutorial classes; so with that sorted out, the headed off to their next class. I talked to Michelle, she would update the enrolment record for Sarah, and I would talk to Greg and let him know why she was transferring.

“Isn’t young love so charming?” Michelle said, laughing.

“I guess that’s my fault,” I said. “I told Michael to apologise to her.”

“I guess she accepted his apology.”

With that out of the way, I went back to the work I was doing on the router programming; I wanted to have the first working version done by the end of the month. All this would do would be to route packets between three different Ethernet networks; the configuration parameters would be hard coded into the system. I had finished my work designing the configuration processes, but that wasn’t as critical as getting the basic packet routing software working. We had set up a small test environment in the computer lab; there were three distinct networks, including the main Arpanet gateway computer.

I was able to make use of a lot of the routing simulation software that I had written for my undergraduate thesis; at least the algorithms could be adapted for use in the router. I just had to translate it from Simula to C, and make the appropriate calls to the TCP/IP libraries that were part of the UNIX operating system. I had spent a fair bit of time designing it to run as a background process – or ‘daemon’ in UNIX terminology. Of course, once the routers were installed in production, everything would have to start and run automatically without any manual intervention. Even though I was designing in a ‘console’ that attached to the serial port, it was only intended to be used for system configuration, not for controlling the operation of the router.

It was good having Janelle with me; at least over the four night period around each weekend. We had the phone line installed and I got an answering machine connected to it; her work had the number and they had already called it several times. On two occasions we were out and the answering machine took the call. We were lying in bed on Saturday morning, after some ‘wake up’ sex, Janelle had her head resting on my chest.

“What would you think if I moved in permanently?” she asked. “I know that for the days – I mean the nights – that I’m working, we won’t see much of each other. But it’s silly me keeping the room in the Nurses’ home, and being here with you as well.”

“Sounds sensible,” I said. “What do we need to do?”

We decided that we would get up, get dressed, and bring back the last of Janelle’s possessions from her room at the hospital. Then we would give the room a quick clean, and she would tell the administration that she was moving out permanently. She would work out a time schedule so that she would be able to get to her work on time for each evening shift. It would mean that I would see her for maybe an hour each evening when I got home – except for Tuesdays. And there would be an hour each morning, after she got home and before I had to leave for Uni. It was far from ideal, but much better than what we had at the moment.

Janelle and I quickly got into a pattern, with her arriving just before I left for work each morning, she would sleep most of the day, and stay until her shift started at Monday night. It was a challenge getting our body clocks into sync; she was accustomed to being awake from 5:00 p.m. until something the next morning, and sleeping during daylight hours. Things weren’t ideal, but we both made compromises. At least there were only a few weeks left in the sailing season, Janelle came along to the sailing club with me; she would spend some hours in the car, parked under a tree and sleep. But she would wake up in time to watch the end of the race, and join in any post-race celebrations.

Because I worked back late on Tuesday nights, I delayed leaving home until around 9:00; that way we had over an hour together. In the evenings, she would have just woken up and had her ‘breakfast’ before I got home, and we would spend the short time together before she had to leave for her work. I would then have my dinner, and relax for the evening. What did happen, though, was just as I had predicted to Mary Beth; we concentrated less on the sex, and more on learning about each other, developing the level of intimacy that we had never had a chance to develop before. On the weekends, when she wasn’t catching up on her sleep, we would sit out in the sunroom and read, or listen to music together, and just enjoy being with each other.

After a few weeks of Janelle living in the house with me, I was feeling content with our arrangements. We had developed a better level of closeness between us; when we had sex, it was less the primal, raw frantic fucking that we had done before, and gentler, more tender. The difference between fucking, sex and making love.

We played quite a few gigs around Sydney during April; the new album and single were doing well on the charts; but we were up against some pretty good songs. I expected we would crack the top ten, but probably not get a number one hit. However, we were asked to come into the ABC Television studios at Gore Hill to pre-record a segment for ‘Countdown’; they felt it was easier to get us all there, rather than the added expense of having us get down to Melbourne.

We got to the studios on a Wednesday afternoon, set up our equipment, and then we were briefed by one of the producers about what Molly would ask us as part of the interview. We felt we were ready, so we all sat down in the studio, and Molly Meldrum came in and spoke with us casually before the format interview started. He told us how he loved our new album, and wanted to know all about the songs on it. After a bit of chit-chat, the producers told us that the actual recording would be starting, we all went quiet as they counted it in.

“Well, here I am, with the members of the Roberttones,” he said, looking at the camera. “They’ve just come out with a fantastic new album and single, and, let me give you the drum, it’s amazing. They’re back to how they were at their best a few years back, a slightly revised line up, and some brilliant new songs.

“It’s called ‘Rocking the Antler’, a reference to the Royal Antler Hotel, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, one of the top venues in Sydney to hear great live music. Can you guys – and girls – tell me how the album came about?”

We had decided Phil would answer most of the questions, unless Molly asked someone specifically.

“Well, we lost a few of our core members early last year,” Phil said. “We spent most of last year pretty much trying to regain ourselves, work out what our sound should be. We got three new members late last year, and...”

“That would be Fiona, Stewart and Traci?” Molly replied.

“Yeah. We needed to bolster up the horn section, plus get some additional vocals, and we decided to focus on the rock / blues style of music. Classic Sydney pub rock, if you want to call it that. Hence the new album; we had some top Aussie talent write some songs for us; we put them to the test on tour through January.”

“Including at the Antler, I assume?”

“Yeah. The great thing about playing there, and some of the other live venues around Sydney, is the audience gives you pretty immediate feedback on how good or crappy a song is. You’re never left wondering if a song is any good!”

“Now, one of the songs on the album, and you released it as a single, is a cover of ‘Nutbush City Limits’. What made you decided to do that one? And to have Allison sing on it – which she does brilliantly, by the way.”

“That was George Young’s suggestion,” Allison said. “Thanks for the compliment, too! I enjoy singing it, it’s something you can really get into.”

“And the audiences really get into it, too,” Phil said. “Whenever we play live, we have to do that one at least twice; everyone is up dancing to it.”

“Well, how about we hear that one now?” Molly said.

We took our places on the stage, after a quick sound check, we launched into it. By now we had played the number so many times that we were pretty polished. Allison put everything she had into it; Traci and Fiona were fantastic as the backup singers and dancers behind her. In fact, Traci was dancing so vigorously that she almost popped out of her top; fortunately she was probably obscured by Allison so that nothing untoward was caught on camera. When we had finished, and the cameras were off, Traci adjusted her top.

“Fuck, I damn near popped out there!” she exclaimed. “I think I need to go back to Charlie’s, see if he can adjust this a bit. Maybe I need a slightly larger cup size for the top; my boobs don’t seem to fit in as well as they should!”

“Do you think we can get you to do the other one on your single?” Molly asked us. “That’s the one you sing, isn’t it, Fiona?”

We rearranged ourselves on the stage, Fiona moved to the front, Traci made another adjustment to her top, tucking her boobs in securely. We were ready for the next song, we waited for them to count us in, and we launched into the song. Fiona really had it down perfectly now; she had just the right mixed of sadness, heartbreak and optimism for the future that the song required. Again, I realized that I could never have sung it as well as she did, the suggestion that she take over the vocals had proven to be the right one.

Molly asked us a few more questions, and that pretty much wrapped up the interview. It would be going to air on the next Sunday night

That Sunday was the final ‘Family Race’ of the season at the sailing club; Janelle came up with me and we had food and drinks for the end of race barbeque. During the race, she found a shady place to rest in the car – she was still on ‘night shift’ time, but she watch the finish of the race – we crossed the line in second place. During the barbeque, she talked with Ian and Celia Craig, and Don McLachlan, and I introduced her to some of the other club members.

We made sure we were home in time to watch ‘Countdown’; I thought it might be good to see about getting one of these new videocassette recorder devices; some of them could be programmed to record programs when no one was there. I had been holding off from buying one; because there seemed to be two incompatible formats, Betamax and VHS; even though Betamax was a superior technology, the market had spoken and the majority of recorders used the VHS format. They were also cheaper than the Beta machines, and offered a longer recording time. I would talk with some of the people in the University’s A/V centre to get their ideas on what would be a reasonable machine to get.

Our appearance on ‘Countdown’ looked pretty good; Traci’s ‘almost’ boob exposure wasn’t visible at all on the screen; the camera was mainly focussed on Allison. However, we got the word from Fifa that sales took a big jump in the week right after our appearance on Countdown. When the sales figures came out for the end of April, the single was now at number 15; having risen from number 30 the week before. Album sales were doing well, too, sales had already passed 10,000 in the two months since the release. It looked like we were on the way for another gold album; we only needed another ten thousand sales. We managed to sell anywhere between fifty and seventy copies of the album, and more of the single at gigs; with more scheduled throughout May sales would continue to grow.

Building AARNET

May, 1981

The first version of the internet router was just about ready for its formal testing; we had set up some test networks. Not that there was all that much in each network; one was just the test PDP 11/40 and some terminals, the other the main Computer Science department PDP 11/70, with a PDP 11/35 and LSI 11 on it, and the third was the gateway machine to ARPANET. The test router had three Ethernet interfaces; one for each network, and the IP address of each network interface was the ‘gateway address’ on each of the networks. That was all that each host in the test environment needed to know about the router; just what was the router address on the local network.

I had done plenty of testing myself, so I knew everything worked, but Professor Dunworth wanted us to run a formal testing session, so he could sign off the first phase of the router development. I had developed some test scripts that I felt would test all aspects of the basic packet routing software, not just to see if packets were routed successfully, but error situations were handled properly. Situations where non-existent addresses were specified, or links went down, things like that.

David and Claude would run the scripts, while Professor Dunworth monitored the results, and made sure everything worked as it should. Just as I had expected, the router worked without any problems.

“I think you need to add another level of diagnostic logging,” he said to me after we had finished the testing. “Maybe showing how destinations are selected, and the temporary routing table is maintained. Each decision point in that algorithm, see if we can see what’s being decided; that way we know what the algorithm is actually doing and can prove it’s working as expected.”

I agreed with him; even though the router appeared to be working correctly, it would be good to have some verification of the algorithm and the way the routing destination table was being maintained, and how each interface was selected when a packet had to be routed.

With the router testing successfully completed, we felt the first stage of the project was done. We had proved that we could customize an LSI-11 to act as a network router, to route data packets between different networks. As yet, we hadn’t tried any interfaces other than native Ethernet, but later in the week we had a meeting with some engineers from Telecom about a new digital data network they were about to introduce.

Meanwhile, we had come up with a plan for the campus-wide network; it was based on one that I had simulated for my undergraduate thesis, and would use fibre-optic links connected to Ethernet adapters. It would be overkill in terms of the bandwidth required, but given that most of the cost in putting in the cable was the labour, we thought we might as well put in plenty of expansion capability for the future.

Just after lunch, Professor Allen called in to see me, to check how the project was going. I was in the middle of working on the plan for the campus wide network. I had obtained an A0 size printout of the campus map, and I was drawing on it where all of the network nodes would be, the routes for the fibre optic cables, and labelling the network IP addresses of all the host computers. He told me that there was a meeting planned for late next week with some network engineers from Telecom, plus the AARNET coordinators from other institutions around Sydney. The aim of the meeting was to kick off the wide area network implementation. He asked if I would be able to have some proposed Sydney-wide network diagrams ready, and wanted to know if I would be able to demonstrate the operations of the router hardware. I told him that would be possible, and I would start on that right away.

I was glad of the experience I had working at the State Government Computer Centre and managing some of those network implementation activities; this project was going to be an order of magnitude more complex; and there was just me coordinating all of the activities. By the end of the week, I had finished the campus network implementation plan, and got approval from all the relevant people for it to proceed. The cables would be installed during the mid-year break, and all terminated up in the main computer centre, on the top floor of the Library tower. Several routers would be installed there, and there would be a link back to the Computer Science department computer room, where the main ARPANET gateway would be located. The university printing department had run off several copies of the large network map, plus some photo-reduced A3 sized versions.

As well, I had come up with a preliminary plan for linking the major institutions around Sydney together; once I had spoken with the Telecom network engineers about what data comms lines we would use the plan could well be modified. But it was a good starting point for discussions.

We met in our small conference room on the morning of May 8th; Professor Allen was chairing the meeting; I was there with Doctor Dunworth. There were also computer networking people from Sydney University, Macquarie University, NSWIT, and the local CSIRO offices. I was surprised to see my father leading the group from Telecom, along with several other engineers. He hadn’t mentioned anything to me about him coming along. After Professor Allen introduced everyone, he spoke briefly about the purpose of the AARNET project; how we would be implementing as a first stage the local network around the UNSW campus, and including some of the other institutions. Eventually the plan was to link all of the universities in Australia into the network.

I then talked about the network plan; first how we would be linking all the locations across the campus, and then a first cut at a Sydney-wide network. I spoke about how we were also developing a network ‘router’, and what its role in the network would be. My father then spoke about the role that Telecom hope to play in the network.

“We are just starting to roll out a major upgrade to our Australia-wide network,” he said. “Until now, our network has been almost completely analogue, since the telephone service was only intended to carry voice traffic. Circuits were bandwidth-limited to a frequency range of 300 Hertz to 3.4 kilohertz; which is perfectly fine for legible voice transmission. But it poses problems for data transmission. The existing ‘datel’ service, where we provide modems to connect digital devices to our existing analogue network, is pretty much speed limited. Since everyone here is an electrical engineer, you are all familiar with the concept of the Nyquist frequency and the Nyquist rate. The data rate across our network is limited by the voice bandwidth restrictions, and to get data transmission rates faster than 1,200 bits per second, we need to have more advanced modulation techniques in our modems, quadrature modulation, combining two or more data bits into each signal element, things like that.

“Our current network uses what we call ‘data over voice’, where we use a modem – to modulate the digital data into an analogue signal that our voice network can handle, and demodulates it at the destination end back to the digital data. Nothing new there, we’ve been doing that since the days of telex machines and teleprinters. Our current project is to move to the complete digitization of our network; pretty much from where the customer’s phone line arrives on our premises, we convert it to digital, do all the switching digitally, the trunk transmission will be all digital. Instead of modems to convert from digital to analogue, we use ‘codecs’; to encode the analogue signal into digital, and decode it back to analogue.

“We are replacing all of our coaxial cable trunk bearers with fibre optic cables; this will give us a massive increase in trunk bandwidth. As part of this, we are introducing a new set of digital data service offerings; Greg Griffiths is the engineer in charge of implementing that system. I’ll hand it over to him to talk about it.”

Greg Griffiths looked vaguely familiar, I wasn’t sure where I had seen him before. He started to talk about Telecom’s new “Dedicated Digital Network – DDN – which would eventually replace the existing ‘datel’ services. While the initial transmission speeds were the same as the existing modem services – 2400, 4800, 9600 and 48,000 bits per second, there were also looking at higher rates in multiples of 64kbps, up to 2.048 Mbps. The primay DTE / DCE interface would be the new X .21 standard. He proposed that we look at using some of the higher speed links between network hubs in the Sydney area, and lower speed links to outlying locations, like our Hydraulics Research lab at Manly Dam.

We took a brief break; tea, coffee and pastries for a morning tea had arrived. Greg came up to me, and shook my hand.

“Another Pittwater High graduate,” he said. “I was there from 1963 to 1969, but I think you went through with my brother, Michael?”

“Of course I remember him,” I said. “What’s he up to now? Last I heard he was studying geology at Sydney Uni?”

“He’s up in the Pilbara, working for Mount Hammersley Iron; as he calls it, he is a ‘rock doctor’. Enjoying it, too. Now, with your network plan, do you have any data volume estimates?”

I pulled out all the network simulation work I had done; he seemed quite impressed with both the results, and the network simulation tool I had used. He asked if that could be made available for Telecom to use; and I said he would need to talk to Professor Allen in the first instance, since it was part of the University’s intellectual property.

After the break, I gave a quick demonstration of the router; at least to the stage it had been developed. I mentioned how the design would allow a variety of network interfaces to be used; the guy from NSWIT asked if I had tested the X .21 interface card yet. I was aware DEC had such a device, however the issue was there was no UNIX device driver available for it.

Greg said they had a back to back set of NTU’s – the equivalent of the modems for the new digital data network – that he could make available for me, if I wanted to test the router hardware and software with it. Peter – the network admin from Sydney Uni – said that it shouldn’t be too hard to write a device driver for the X .21 interface, just base it off the current serial port driver. It was starting to sound like a plan was forming for the wide area network development – we could use Telecoms DDN for the circuits; once I had developed and tested the necessary device drivers.