Chapter 15

Steve -- MARCH 1961

On Tuesday, Sandy and I again breakfasted and then drove both cars to IBM. We went into the conference room, where Chad and the others soon joined us. Chad had a new set of charts, which looked very promising. In conclusion, he told us, "It's even more solid than I had thought. As I showed you, we have validated most of the extensions in our lab already. We are only waiting for a prototype version of the wider cartridge to be fabricated to do the rest."

I said, "Chad, that's very good news. Be sure to tell Murray that I'm very pleased with your progress. I'm available if he has any questions before he goes back."

We then spent the rest of the morning going over the remaining unresolved items, and made slow, but steady progress towards getting them closed out.

After lunch, I said to Chet and Sandy, "I've been thinking about something. As I see it, the Reaper box is essentially a stored program computer, although one with a rather unique instruction format. Is that right?"

They said that was the case. Chet asked, "Where are you going with this?"

"Wait a minute, let me go on. Am I right in thinking that in a traditional computer like, say, the CDC1604, there are three stages in the processing of each instruction, namely instruction fetch, instruction decoding and address generation, and finally execution?"

Chet said, "Yes. We call the first two I-cycles, and the rest E-cycles. Moreover, although we have a lot of overlap, instruction pre-fetch, and even some pre-execution in Stretch itself, the classic model, as you've summarized it, fits Reaper quite well."

"Here's what I'm thinking. Sandy showed us yesterday how simple the table-lookup function is using the current control word structure. What if we added another bit in the control word that caused the machine to skip the first I cycle and re-use the previously fetched control word, but only if all four WXYZ values were zero? It seems to me that this would speed up table-lookup and other search-type operations considerably, by eliminating a memory fetch operation."

I could see Sandy perk up as Chet said, "That does sound interesting. I think that Sandy and I need to think about it for a little bit; it's going to require some changes, and we need to see where they fall on the scale that runs from minor to catastrophic."

Chet and Sandy started to review the instruction fetch, decode, and address generation process in more detail. I listened, not saying much, mostly because I was interested in learning more about the inner workings of Reaper.

They were still at it when it was time to quit for the day. I asked if Sarah would be available the next day, and found out that she wouldn't be in until Thursday. I really did want to talk to her about the programming questions that were simmering in my mind, but I certainly didn't mind that I now had a good reason to stay until Friday morning.

Sandy and I went back to the Three Cabs for pizza that evening. I looked at her, and said, "Sandy, my love, the last time we were here..."

She interrupted me, saying quietly, "How well I remember, dear. How lucky it was for us that your car wouldn't start!"

We looked into each other's eyes for a while, holding hands, saying nothing. The moment was broken when our pizza arrived, and we dug in eagerly.

Sandy said, "That was a great idea you came up with there today. Chet and I still need more time, but so far we don't see any major problems with doing it that way."

I said, playfully, "What a shame that Sarah won't be available until Thursday. I guess we did come up with a good reason for me not to have to leave early!"

Sandy grinned and batted at my arm, not saying anything.

Soon we were back in my room, and I took Sandy in my arms, hugging her and holding her close. We didn't say much, but gently undressed each other and, after another hug, lay down together in the bed. I started running my hands up and down her body, and suddenly, she grabbed me and pulled me on top of her, kissing me and running her hands up and down my back, from my neck to as far down my legs as she could reach. It felt so good! I reciprocated by running my hands up and down her ribs, gently brushing the sides of her breasts.

She gasped, and moaned, "Oh, Steve! Oh my dearest!" and I worked my hands gently over her breasts, cupping them and gently squeezing them. Her breath started to get ragged, and she cried out, "Steve, now! Please, dammit, now!"

I was becoming more and more aroused myself, and, as I slid into her, she quivered and gasped, "Ah! Steve!" Gradually at first, our bodies moved together in a gentle rhythm, but soon, our movements became more and more intense. Sandy was whimpering and moaning incoherently, and I was gasping for breath. Our sensations took over as we felt ourselves rapidly ascending the peak. Suddenly she screamed with pleasure as I felt a tremor and then a powerful spasm inside her. That was all it took to send me over the edge, as I cried out loudly, "Sandy! Oh, love!"

We gradually came down from the glorious high, and just held each other, kissing tenderly, caressing each other, and murmuring happy, contented sounds. We drifted off to sleep in each other's arms, enveloped by our closeness.

I was woken up in the morning by a very warm, passionate kiss from Sandy, who said, "That was for last night, my love! You make me so happy and make my world so full of joy and beauty." as she kissed me over and over again.

I hugged her and kissed her back, saying, "Dear love, dear Sandy! You do all that and so much more for me." Then I ran my hand gently over her face, down her neck, touched her nipple, and ran my finger down past her bellybutton, through her thatch, and touched the treasure between her legs. She put both her hands on my chest, and then reached down and grasped my erect cock, saying, "It looks like you need some help with that. I know where you should put it."

Not being a fool, I did exactly that, and things just got better and better after that.

As we lay there afterwards, the damn alarm went off! I said, "Sandy, dear love, it's a good thing you woke up earlier. I'd have hated to have had that go off ten minutes ago." I kissed her once more, sprung out of bed, and quickly finished in the bathroom, telling her, "As it is, we do have time to shower together, but we'll have to save the thorough washing for another time."

Sandy grinned, saying, "OK, but you owe me a gentle, full body wash later," as she joined me for a quick shower.

Soon we were out of the room and after a quick breakfast, drove to IBM. Sandy and Chet continued where they had left off the day before, and by lunchtime, they agreed that the instruction fetch bypass that I had suggested would indeed work with very little modification to the design concept as it stood, and would be incorporated in the next version of the spec.

After lunch, we spent the rest of the day going through each field of the control word, giving the field a name, and identifying each of the functions that would be specified by the codes in that field. We also summarized the interactions between the Stretch and Reaper programs, and the interrupt mechanisms associated with them. I had a purpose for doing this; I wanted to have this information available for the discussions with Sarah on Thursday.

We drove back to the motel, and as we hugged, Sandy said, "Steve, I'm annoyed with you!"

Alarmed, I said, "Why? What have I done wrong?"

She said, "You didn't do anything wrong, silly! But it's not fair that you are paying for all our meals together, when we both know that I earn a great deal more than you."

"Sandy, my love, I guess I'm maybe a bit old-fashioned in that department. Besides, while it's true that I don't earn a great deal, I don't have a lot of expenses either; I get a housing and food supplement to my base pay from the Navy."

Sandy smiled, and said, "And just how much do you think I'm spending on food and a place to live?"

"Well, you do have a point. I do insist, however, that you don't think you have to pay for everything. Once in a while, I'd still like it to be my treat." as I gently kissed her, continuing, "Mmmm, OK?"

She put her arms around me, saying, "Steve, love, of course!" and then gave me a warm kiss.

A few minutes later, our clothes were on the chair, we were in bed, and we became lost in each other. Finally, we had time for me to give Sandy the thorough washing in the shower that I owed her; naturally, I was washed equally thoroughly and lovingly.

As I started to dress, Sandy said, "We're starting tonight. Dress nicely, because I'm taking you to Kaal Rock", as she slipped into the lovely sweater that I'd seen her wear before, and a nice gray tweed skirt.

We had a very nice meal, and it was another clear night. There was only a new moon, so the view of the mountains was not as dramatic as the last time we had driven up here, but it was still awesome.

As we were eating, Sandy said, "Well, you seem to have managed to avoid having no excuse to stay beyond Tuesday, didn't you?"

"Yes, but you helped."

Sandy retorted, "Who, me?"

"Yes, you, and you know it! Unfortunately, I really do need to leave Friday morning; Sam and Murray will have my head if I don't report to them this week. At least, we will have had almost a full week together this time."

She said softly, "Yes, dear love, I realized that you would have to leave before another weekend. We'll just have to make the most of the time we have left."

"You can count on that. I hope you can come visit me in Washington next month for a long weekend-can you manage that?"

"Damn right I can manage it! It certainly won't be a problem, since I have built up a lot of vacation time by now. You know I want to come."

"I can also get a few days off, so we can have a nice visit. We'll have time for hiking along the canal towpath and sightseeing as well as some delicious time for ourselves."

I went on to say, "This weekend, I'm going to get serious about finding a new apartment, and, as soon as I arrange one, I'll also arrange for my parents to ship the truckload of furniture and kitchen stuff that they promised me. Hopefully we can cook together once in a while, and I know some exotic restaurants in Washington that I'm sure you'll like."

"That would be nice. Remember, I get to pay, at least most of the time."

"OK, my love, I'm sure that my first month in the new place, I'll need to buy all sorts of odds and ends, so I won't argue with that. Also, I still have hopes of buying a car sometime soon."

We each had a little bit of wine left in our glasses. Sandy raised hers, and I also raised mine. We carefully clinked them together, as she said, "Here's to our April visit in Washington, then."

We drank the wine, and looked in each other's eyes for a while. Eventually, Sandy settled the check, and I drove back to the motel.

Thursday morning was a repeat of the day before; Sandy woke me with a scorching kiss, which led to tender caressing, holding and enjoying each other's bodies, and a slow, delicious session of lovemaking before the alarm went off. We even had time for a thorough shower afterwards.

I said to Sandy, "I could definitely get used to waking up this way, darling."

"So could I! I do have a confession to make - apparently you didn't hear my tiny alarm go off either yesterday or today."

"Aha! Who am I to complain, it was definitely in a very good cause."

When we got to the conference room, Sarah was waiting for us. She was a large-boned older woman, with a pleasant face and slightly faded blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses. She was still attractive, with a good figure. I thought she looked like a horse person, which was confirmed when she made mention of the farm they had near Millbrook where she and her husband kept several horses.

Most of the time she was quite easy-going, but at times she went into "elder statesman mode" and delivered authoritative-sounding pronouncements about program design and programming languages. She told some fascinating tales of the early days of computing, stories about the IBM 701 and the Univac 1, which were early vacuum tube machines, and how she had served on a committee with the legendary Grace Hopper.

We showed her the control word layout, and explained the instruction sequencing mechanism and the multi-way branching capability. She didn't say anything for a few minutes, as she began to grasp the concepts. She said, "You know, this looks something like the microprogramming that the guys at the Hursley Lab, in England, are working on. The difference is that in their case, the microprogram is what runs the computer and actually interprets its instruction set; that's a bit different from this." Finally she said, "What you're going to get is a smart assembler. A compiler, if we can figure out how to do one, will take a lot longer."

I said, "I had figured as much. I'll work with what we get, and after I've done a lot more programming, maybe I'll have some ideas for a compiler."

Sarah continued, "Well, ideally I would expect that you would want to write a program as a complex flowchart, with all the branches showing. Unfortunately, while that's a good way for you to organize your programs, it's not a good format for direct entry into a computer assembler program. Let's call these control words instructions; it's easier to think of them that way for this discussion. What I think you want, and what we can provide, is an input format that consists of several fields. The first field is a semi-symbolic instruction address; the high order part being symbolic, and each of the low order four characters being 0, 1, or where is "don't care." She drew a simple flowchart on the blackboard, showing one instruction that branched to one of two successors depending on the specified W condition.

She went on to describe a fairly involved addressing scheme, and how the assembler would help with memory allocation. When I grasped how it would work, I realized that in fact, it was going to be fairly easy to use, and summarized my understanding of it to see if it matched hers.

She beamed, saying, "Yes, you seem to have picked this up very quickly. Let's go on. You have a number of fields that specify the components of the operation of the instruction, along with the indexing mode and parameters. You also have the fields that specify the conditions that set the four flags WXYZ, along with one field for the base address of the next instruction. Some of the instructions also specify a data address."

She went on to lay out an assembler-like format and explained how the codes for each of the fields could be assigned and written in a free-form format. It made good sense, and, while it looked complex, I realized that it would be fairly easy to use.

She paused, and asked, "Steve, what do you think?"

I grimaced, and said, "Well, it sounds complex, but then, Reaper itself is complex. It's obvious that we can't come up with a simpler approach, especially on the tight schedule facing us. I like the free form field idea, and I assume that for each field for which no mnemonic was specified, that a default would be defined. Is that your thinking?"