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<b>Van Snyder

</b><dd>My first machine was the Bendix G-15, which was used in a summer
class.  After that, I bummed 1620 time at Cal State LA.  My first job after
college was operating 084, 088, 514, 519, ... for Reynolds and Reynolds Company
in North Hollywood, CA.  Soon I was operating a 16k 1401 with one 7330 -- a
really slow tape drive.  It also had a piano-size gadget by NCR that scanned
OCR characters from paper tapes about 3 inches wide.  I wrote a few dinky
programs for the center manager in SPS, so he sent me to company headquarters
in Dayton, OH, where I started programming in Autocoder.  We had all three of
the reader, printer and punch running full speed using overlap and double
buffering, which we were later told was impossible to do.  When we started
using COBOL I modified the compiler to emit the COBOL code into the output
Autocoder as comments, to facilitate debugging.  I worked in Dayton ten hours
per day, every day for eleven months.  My wife got burned out on that, so we
moved back to California in 1967 and I began work at JPL, where I've been ever
since.  I used the 7094 and then Univac 1108 until they put a PC on my desk in
1984.  I never used a 1401 after 1967, but I still remember how to program it
in machine language or Autocoder.