Chapter 37

SANDY - Friday, January 26, 1962

It wasn't until last weekend that I had completely recovered from the distress I felt between the time that Paul told me about the hijacking and when Steve finally called from Miami. I did make good progress on my suggested revisions to the Stretch course, and thought that I would have the first pass on everything done in another week.

I left work early and drove straight to LaGuardia, in plenty of time for my six o'clock flight. Steve was waiting for me at the airport in Washington, and we hugged each other for dear life for several minutes. Hand in hand, we made our way to the baggage claim area and collected my suitcase.

"I've made a reservation for us at the Indian restaurant. Is that OK?"

"Oh, yes! I was hoping that we'd get there sometime this trip."

"Let's stop at the apartment, take just a moment to freshen up, and then we'll go. I suspect that you are almost as hungry as I am."

"Yes, but not just for food, dearest love."

His response was to squeeze my hand. We went out of the terminal and found his car in the short-term lot.

"It's so much milder here than it was in Poughkeepsie. I think I'm going to like it here."

"Yes, the winters are easy to take, but summer can be brutal, between the heat and the humidity."

"Well, the Hudson Valley has that in the summer also."

Just then we pulled into the parking lot at the apartment. Steve got my bag out of the trunk, and we went upstairs to his apartment. After another hug, I went to the bathroom and gave my face a quick wash. We went back outside, and again, hand in hand, walked to the Indian restaurant. Soon we were seated, and sipped our tea as we studied the menu.

After we ordered, I asked, "What have you been doing, besides an unplanned journey, since I left you at the airport last week?"

"I've been working with two very smart programmer trainees, teaching them about Reaper programming. Sarah's material has been very helpful, and next week I'll send her some comments and suggestions. What about you?"

"I have the Stretch training course material for the Customer Engineers almost completely reworked. As I had told you, both Miguel and Pierre thought that the original material was pretty bad, and gave me a lot of useful suggestions. By the way, did I tell you that Miguel will almost certainly be assigned to Washington, specifically to your machine when it's delivered next month?"

"No, but now I know that it will be in good hands. I'll look forward to seeing him again."

"I had dinner with Mom and Walt last night. They both looked very happy, and I'm so glad for them. She has to look for a new job; hospital policy frowns on her working for Walt, even indirectly. I think that she may look for a nice daytime job in a doctor's office, maybe only three or four days a week."

Just then our food arrived, and we started eating. What we had were pieces of chicken bathed in a very fragrant and tasty sauce, served over rice, and it was delicious, as was the basket of nan that came with it.!

STEVE - Saturday, January 27, 1962

The morning sun woke me up, and I became very aware of Sandy's lovely body snuggled close to me. Not wanting to wake her, I just moved closer and very gently touched her hair. She purred a bit in her sleep, and I must have dozed again, for the next thing I knew I heard the toilet flushing as she emerged from the bathroom. I untangled myself from the covers, gave her a warm hug, took my turn in the bathroom, and made a pot of coffee. By the time it was done and I brought in two mugs, she was back in bed, beckoning me to join her. I held her and said, "It looks like a nice day, and it's certainly starting out well! In a little while, after breakfast, let's hit the canal trail."

"That sounds good, but right now I like the way the day is starting out, and I have a feeling that it's about to get a lot better."

"Dearest Kitten, dearest love!"

"Mmmmm."

She was right - the day did get off to a glorious start, and the rest of the weekend was great. In addition to a nice hike on the trail, we had time for the National Gallery and a trip to the Jefferson Memorial. We also stopped at the supermarket and got food for the next few days, and we had a lot of fun cooking our evening meals.

All too soon, the alarm went off Monday morning. I went to the kitchen, quickly fixed coffee, and brought the mugs into the bedroom. We shared a shower, and while Sandy was getting dressed in a sharp new business suit and finishing her hair, I prepared grapefruit and English muffins for breakfast. She was going to take my car to get to her interviews in Bethesda, so I pointed out the easiest route on a map and made sure that she would have it with her. We left the apartment together, and after a hug and a kiss, I wished her luck and set forth on my way to work.

When I got in to work, I saw Murray, who said, "I have good news for you. Vlad and Lou now have been granted their full clearances. They need to see Tony Simms to get their badges updated, and then you can fill them in on the big Reaper application."

"That's very good. I wasn't sure how much longer I was going to be the only person to carry the ball!"

I stopped by to see Sam, and gave him the news and arranged for him to spend some time with the trainees, giving them the big picture of what we wanted to accomplish with Reaper. The day went quickly, and after the meeting with Sam, I met with Vlad and Lou myself.

"Tomorrow, I'm going to let you start to study the application program that was the justification for the monster machine that we'll be getting in a few weeks. It must never leave this building, and any notes you make need to be locked up at the end of the day with the program listings and documentation. You'll see some similarities between it and the acceptance test that I ran last month at IBM; that was deliberate on my part. I sanitized parts of the real application logic so that it could be unclassified and I could take the code with me to Poughkeepsie. Any questions so far?"

"What's going to happen when the machine gets here?"

"The first thing is that the IBM team, with help from Isaac, will move it into position and make the connections between the different boxes. Once they have that done and run their tests, I'll run my acceptance test again to make sure that nothing broke since the last time I ran it. After that, I'll start with debugging the real program; I'm not sure how long that will take me. I have some artificial test data for it, but I haven't run it, even on a simulator, since the Reaper simulator runs on Stretch."

"Where does the real data come from, and how much is there?"

"I don't even know where all of it comes from, but part of the process is the preprocessing of the data and writing it to the fast tapes."

Lou and Vlad both exclaimed, "What fast tapes?"

"Sorry about that. I was so focused on introducing you to the basics of Reaper programming that I never mentioned a couple of things. Because of the volume of data we have to process, one of the requirements that we presented to IBM was a need for a much faster tape system. Standard IBM 729-4 tape drives have a peak data rate of just over sixty thousand characters per second. We need to make repeated passes over at least 20 million characters in five hours; even the fancy IBM Hypertape drives are not even three times faster than the 729. What we got was a combination of incremental improvements on Hypertape that gives us a peak data rate of one and a third million characters per second'.

Vlad said, "Wow! How did they pull that off?"

"As I said, there were three incremental improvements over the Hypertape design. The first was a wider tape. Secondly, they move it twice as fast. Finally, they doubled the recording density. There were a lot of smart engineers working on this at IBM last year."

"Then you must be planning on a small army of people to be constantly changing tapes."

"No, another thing that they came up with was a sort of jukebox arrangement, so that it will automatically preload tapes under control from the Stretch program. You'll have to see it in action to completely believe it."

Lou said, "You said 'a couple of things'. What else is there?"

"Just a small part of memory that's significantly faster than the regular Stretch core memory. It really pays off for frequently accessed data and program loops. There are no special instructions associated with this; we use regular Stretch move operations to move data between the regular and the fast memory areas. I'll show you more about using it when we go through the application."

"Ah. I wondered why you were moving stuff from one memory area to another in the acceptance test before starting a loop."

"Exactly. I think that's all the surprises I have for you, although I'm sure you'll be overwhelmed by the physical size of the machine. Stretch itself is large, but the Reaper box is twice the size of the Stretch frame. Tomorrow afternoon I'll give you the full overview of how the application is structured and we can start to look at the programs. For the rest of today and tomorrow morning, I'd like you to refresh your understanding of basic Stretch programming, and then you can look at this," as I handed them a five-page writeup describing the instructions for the fast tapes and the jukebox.

SANDY - Monday, January 29, 1962

I was still glowing from the weekend with Steve, and the hug and kiss that he gave me as I was about to get into his car for the drive to Bethesda. I followed his map with no problems, and in about twenty minutes, found the IBM Federal Systems building in Bethesda. The letter I had received with my interview schedule had included directions to their visitor parking lot, so I was spared the hassle of trying to find a space to park on a nearby street. I locked the car, and walked around to the front door of the building. I went in, and in addition to the usual receptionist, noticed an armed guard near the desk. I announced myself to the receptionist, who, after consulting a list, smiled at me and said, "I see you are scheduled to meet with Mr. Elton this morning, and Mr. Boumann after lunch. I'll call Mr. Elton's office and tell them that you are here. In the meantime, can I see your ID?"

"Sure." I pulled out my IBM ID and gave it to her. She looked at it, and asked, "Do you have anything that proves that you are a US citizen?"

I thought for a moment, and said, "Not with me, but you could contact my manager in Poughkeepsie - Paul Napoli, who can vouch for that, and advise you of my security clearances."

After consulting the front of her phone book, she asked me for his extension. I gave it to her, and she dialed the call over the IBM tie line system. We were lucky; Paul was in his office, and gave her the information that she needed.

She smiled again, said, "You're all set. Mr. Elton will be down shortly." She then had me sign the register and gave me a visitor badge.

I took a seat in the lobby, and it was another ten minutes before a slender, blond, nervous looking young woman came into the lobby, asking for me. I stood up, and she said, "I'm Nancy, Mr. Elton's secretary. He asked me to come down and bring you up to his office. Unfortunately, he's tied up on a conference call with some Navy people, but he'll be with you soon. In the meantime, one of his managers, Ron Thompson, will try to fill you in on what we're doing here."