Today is Tuesday 24 April 2012 we're doing an interview for the Arizona
State University retirees association video history project we are located
today at the community services building on curry road in Tempe. I am
David shots lee professor emeritus. The technical sports staff today is
richard hey for operating the audio and linda vance coy operating the
camera and also chair of the video history project.
Also in attendance is Barbara Bradford. Please introduce yourself stating
your name, your years of service today? S you and your highest position.
Um I'm Darryl S bach. I was born in Carey Ohio and I came to Arizona State
University in january of 1976. It's not clear when I retired Although I
think I officially and probably recorded is retiring in about 2002. I went
to halftime and and I spent a little bit of time following that doing some
special project work for the border regions. And then I used a way after
that 20 let our viewers know a little about your early life and how your
experiences prepared you for your career at A. S. U. First when and where
were you born?
Well as I say I was born in Carey Ohio. I went to School their K through
12. I am eventually
through some very good circumstances and the
help of high school principals and others that took an interest in some of
their students went to the University of twitter got a bachelor's in
mechanical engineering. I fell in love with computing. My last semester in
college because my department chair dr kirkpatrick of mechanical
engineering had gotten the first IBM computer while the first computer of
any sort on campus and through discussions with him, I ended up being the
first full time employee at the University of Toledo, dealing with
computers and at that time it was primarily academic, although eventually
I got involved with a little bit of the administrative activities. Um We
had an IBM 16 20 for the academic side of the house And an IBM 1401 for
the admin. Um And as the years went on, technology changed, things
happened. Um And then eventually I came to the issue and january 76 going
back to the early days in Carey Ohio, tell us a little about Kerry the
town and what happened there, Carrie is most prominent in my mind, at
least for two
yes, two major things. There's a large catholic shrine church there and
they had as their primary industry, a large hole in the ground limestone
quarry and they made line and it coated the city pretty well, it was very
much a farm sort of community. Um even though there was a little bit of
industry, I think the population of the city was around the city, the town
, It's around 38:00
and it's not much larger than that today. It's a very been very stable
community for many years. So you had explosions during the night, I guess
from the quarry. Well, watching the, I was a good student. My family
encouraged
the academic side of things. We were farm family. My mother and father
both came from that sort of a background, but I just was doing what kids
do in a little town like that. And I tried hard to do it. Well, it
probably wasn't until I was in high school that there was any real
significant indication that I might be sort of technologically oriented. I
did well in chemistry and physics and math and had some really good
teachers in those areas. And the principal of the high school took some
note of that and he's the one that really encouraged me two
go to college because I told him when we first talked, well, I'll probably
be going over to the porcelain factory and trying to get a job where my
dad worked and he says, well you can probably
do something a little more academic if you put your mind to it. So at any
rate with a little bit of help from him and probably some letters that I
don't know about. He got me to the University of Toledo where I got a
freshman scholarship and once that happened, I was hooked pretty much on
that as a path from my next few years. Um, there was also national defense
loans at that time. So once you've got your foot in the door was fairly
easy to stay there as long as you did a little bit of work in this class.
So did you have any musical
Background? Yeah, I started playing my Granddad's cornet in the 5th grade.
It's now a little over 100 years old I guess. And I still get it out once
in a while. But I,
I really enjoyed the music, I enjoyed the camaraderie of that. People are
important and things that I've done, the association with others is
important. At any rate. My mother didn't, I really liked the idea even
though I was a big husky guy of football and things of that sort. So she
was glad to encourage the music side of things. And um, I did some, some
fairly good things with music. I managed to continue that and at the
University of Toledo as well and had a great time being a real amateur
with a bunch of professionals in the music school at the University of
Toledo. I um For some strange reason, got to play 2nd chair behind a
tremendous trumpet player and it was just a very nice augmentation to
other things that young people do. So the University of Toledo, you got in
with the computers and once you graduated, what, what did you do with that
experience? Well, the very last semester that I was in um, my
undergraduate program at the University of Toledo, I needed a course to
round things out and I took a four trend programming course. It was the
only computer course that was really offered there. And at that same time
, doctor Kirkpatrick, the head of the mechanical engineering department
where I was housed um Had gotten an NSF grant and the university installed
its first computer in IBM 1620. And I remember coming back from a job
interview, some engineering company in indiana, I don't even remember who
it was now. I said, you know, those engineers are really missing the boat
, there's so much of what they do that they could do so much quicker and
more accurately and things of that sort if they use the computer. And so
he said, well you're getting kind of interested in this stuff, you're
taking my course, you're doing well with that and everything, would you be
interested in working in the field of computing? I said, well, you know, I
don't know, it's not exactly mechanical engineering. And he said, yeah,
but when you have an interest you should probably pursue it. And I, he
talked to me a little bit and I said, well what are you suggesting? He
said, well we need to hire someone to run this, I'm in charge. Doctor
Kirkpatrick said I'm in charge, but I have this academic program to run
and things of that sort and it would be really nice to have someone that
we could sort of turn the day to day over two. And so as a result I became
the first computer employee and essentially ran what was the academic
computing facility at the University of Toronto. Um After a few years some
people in the administration thought they should
computerized some of the things that they were doing which were basically
with nothing but punch cards and sorting and collating and doing funny
things that way. And so we were A participant in getting an IBM 1401 into
that operation. Um From there we grew we ended up with much larger
computers.
On the academic side it was primarily the engineers initially and then
there were a few others in the math area and in the science area that
found something they could do with computers. And then everybody was
finding a tool in the computer that would could be applied to their
academic pursuits. One of the more interesting little projects that I
worked on was for one of the librarians where we used the computer to
generate a concordance of I think it was some of Edgar Allan Poe's work
and
it wasn't a very good machine to use for that purpose. But on the other
hand, when the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like
nails and so we drove that one into the ground as best we could. And he
got a nice publication out of it. And I got a nice thank you appreciation.
Were you working with any industry allies there? Dr Patrick had gotten
some interesting things going on. Had some interesting things going on
with orange corning, fiberglass. Um They make installation as you know,
and one of the things that they were looking for is some way to use
technology to kind of promote their insulation. And so they started a
program which Doctor Kirkpatrick had designed for them essentially of
comparing kind of minimum insulation for a house to an upgraded insulation
for a house and guaranteeing that if you use the upgrade installation,
your annual heating and air conditioning bills would be no more than so
much. And so while I was actually a student, I started doing some of these
calculations for Doctor Kirkpatrick for Owens corning uh by hand, my
trusty slide rule and long pads of paper. Um but since I was taking his
computer courses, I'm and needed a term project. He said, well why don't
you computerize that? So we did. And as a result um we really geared up
what we could do for our own scorning fiberglass. And then the real capper
to that little story is that Doctor Kirkpatrick encouraged me to write a
little paper about it, which I did. And it got published in the ashtray
journal. And that led to my getting a free trip to California to talk to
the people of uh southern California Edison. And they adopted the program.
And at that rate, it was it was a very interesting time to apply
technology to a real world problem. And then we also because they happen
to be there in town did some similar kind of um, simple minded computer
work for jeep corporation, they have six models of Jeeps or whatever it is.
But if you look at jeeps, there's a lot of parts that are similar from
one model to the next. They all take sort of the same sort of fenders and
same body parts and same hood and so forth. And so they had a certain
number of presses to stamp out these body parts. They had a number of each
model that they wanted to make and they wanted a little computer program
to tell them how to run their press line in order to get the right number
of parts and whatever to make the commitment to their production. And so I
wrote a little FORTRAN program to do that press loading for them And made
a few $100 every time we ran it to uh, to help with that. So these were,
these were kind of early introductions to the utility of computing I guess.
Where does the name Lynn bellamy come in? Lynn Bellamy comes in at the
very end of the 13 years that I was in Toledo. Lynn had gone with a small
group of engineers to Saudi Arabia to establish for the Saudis, the
University of Petroleum and minds. The Saudis were getting a little tired
of the fact that they had to hire all these american engineers to run the
oil fields and they wanted to develop some homegrown talent and so Lynn.
And as a matter of fact ken Pollack also, was that a issue? Eventually, um
we're in that category of american engineers that set up the University of
Petroleum and minds. And Lynn came back to the states after I think it was
four years or maybe six working in Saudi Arabia um sort of a step down I
suppose. But you know when you're out of the country, it's a little bit
hard getting reintroduced to the mainstream and in this wonderful advanced
technology oriented society that we have, but he came to the University of
Toledo and the head of, of all computing, which by that time had begun to
merge the academic and the administrative side of things. Um, and that's
where I met Lynn, I, I became one of three people that reported to him
there and I was responsible still for a sense of the operations, the big
iron, it was all big iron, then there were no microcomputers. Um, and I am
the big iron. There was in fact IBM um As I say, it started out with the
1620 on the academic side of 1401 on the admin side, we grew to 360 model
50s and 3 71 45 0, a bunch of other things and eventually actually the
university tweeted and Bowling Green State University um collaborated on a
joint venture
sharing a much larger IBM system and we did most of our work from remote
job entry terminals. Um, and that's pretty much the environment that was
there. When I finally left. In the meantime, we did a lot of borrowing and
begging for computer time on other people's big machines. Marathon oil uh
, is pretty good sized
petroleum industry business in the petroleum industry. And their homed in
Findlay Ohio, which is like 60 miles from Toledo. And I lived in Carrie,
which was just a little 15 miles further. And so on many weekends I would
borrow computer time ought the marathon oil computers and I would take
stuff from the university lito, stop and finley run it and then bring it
back on monday when I came back from my hometown. Um, Straight down I 75
down I 75 cut across on 23. Yeah, you didn't tell us when you were born. I
was born May eight,
Okay. and graduated from high school, I assume 58 with a class of 58
University of Toledo graduated and I graduated in 63 because I,
essentially, the engineering program was a four year program with one
summer school and I was a poor enough kid that I needed to work during the
summers. So I went an extra semester and it was during that extra semester
that computers happened for me. Okay. So now Lynn bellamy's there. You're
there. What happens to get a move to Arizona, Well, Arizona State
University was making the public technology press rather dramatically
around that period of time. Um The issue was a fairly large school even
then, much larger of course now, but
they were growing rapidly, not just large, but they were growing rapidly.
And the fact is that computers were beginning to be important to a lot of
people, particularly the academic side of the house. And so there were
computers over here in the business college and there were some of the
engineering college and there were some things going on in the math
department and liberal arts and the administration, I'm guessing, but I
believe this is probably true. Administration started to be concerned
about the fact that, gosh, we're spending a lot on computing. Um but you
don't see it because it's kind of diffused through the organization.
So at any rate, a fellow by the name of Bruce alper who's I understand it
was the head of the library uh convinced the administration in that
environment that we ought to get a handle on this. And not only that we
ought to do something about trying to optimize our use of computers. And
so he convinced
someone, the President VPs, but he impressed the upper administration with
the idea of consolidating computing into a more organized central function.
And a lot of a lot of large institutions were doing that, not only
academic institutions, but businesses as well. So, at any rate, he
contracted with the Novak for a very, very, very early um Univac 11,000
Series Machine. It was, it was a state of the art machine. So state of the
art that it had a lot of problems. So a issue had this difficulty with the
technology that wasn't very mature at the same time. They were trying to
reorganized people into a centralized concept of computing and the unrest.
The unrest today issue was very, very significant. As I say, it made the
national trade press and I was aware of it. Lynn was aware of it. He got
hired in Late 75. I want to say it was probably October to um do something
about the unrest and it wasn't clear that that had anything to do with
hardware or software, it probably had more to do with people than anything
else. But he was hired to fix that problem. He invited me to come out and
interview and the interview process was quite interesting. Others have
commented on that the interview process was very intense in terms of, I
don't know, I must have interviewed 20 people in two days, Maybe it wasn't
20, but it was a very large number. And the reason had to do with this
unrest, not with the fact that they were trying to have such a really
great hiring process. Hopefully it it helped that too. But people were
really concerned about what was going on. Well at any rate. I passed
muster evidently with the people that I interviewed, Lynn hired me and in
January of 76 I moved to Arizona State University with similar
responsibilities to what I had at the university, Twitter under him that
is centralized computing operations and whatever else needed to be done.
Um I guess I've always felt that my job description
from the first day I was hired at the University of Toledo. The most
important phrase was the one down at the bottom of paragraph and other
duties as assigned because that's where you get the good stuff at any rate.
So we spent the next few years, it was probably only a year or so getting
the troops together. Ah hiring people like Connie McNeill two help turn
this into a real organization but turning around the attitude on campus so
that when you went to a meeting, People were no longer showing up with
those three and 4 three ring binders and fiddling through them to see if
what you're saying today matched what was said six months ago. Um But
we're comfortable with the idea that it was a participatory environment of
peoples um attitudes and opinions were being taken into account, hopefully
respected but at least being taken into account and
then we were able to move forward with doing something new and exciting
with the computing per se. That first job you had, what was the job
description of that. Oh gee other than as required, I believe that the
initial job that I had was,
and I don't remember his director Manager, but something in charge of
central operations. So I was responsible for the big hardware. I was
responsible for the operators. I was responsible for whatever was
connected to the computer, which at that time was not much, it was a very
LTD central operation. Um We had a few administrative terminals, but
terminals were still to come. Okay, you might uh describe the difference
between the two following uh types of computers. The academic computing
and the administrative and maybe trace some of that history. Academic
computing, as I say, had been very much in departments and it was
for the departments that had a lot of money and good foresight, very nice
for departments that maybe didn't have quite as much funding or quite the
anticipation foresight of what was coming down the road, it was more of a
struggle. And so this centralization of academic computing was fairly easy
to make people more satisfied with a bigger, more available resource. At
the same time, the administration was just beginning to understand that
computers could be used to do mundane things like room scheduling,
students scheduling, grade reporting, um personnel management, things of
that sort. And so there were little individual stand alone pieces of
administrative computing that we're trying to be assembled and moved into
a more central operation as well During this period of time. Post 76. Um
The dramatic 1st step for Lynn and his contingent was to bring in a fairly
decent sized IBM computer and begin moving all of those disparate little
pieces onto that single machine as well. Um We ended up putting that
machine in the engineering B wing, which is where some of the old Ge and
Honeywell machines had been. Um And the academic Univac was still in
engineering a wing, they were still being run As two separate hardware
facilities, but that was easy to manage. It was the problem of getting
everything consolidated physically
from a application standpoint. Um That that was still a major outstanding
issue. Um But the academic and the administrative grew up with the
academic always having more demand than the administrative in terms of
computing power. And so we got into an era for several years where we
would get the next new machine for the academic side of the house and the
older machine would move over to the admin side of the house. And
eventually of course all of that changed dramatically when desktop
computing, it took so much of what is being done away from the central
facilities and distributed out to individual desktops. Um And and
departments you say Connie McNeill came on board about the time a little
later than you did. What was her responsibility? Well, again, remember
This is 1976 and I think Connie came to a issue in the Middle part of 76,
or maybe just a little bit later. Um I think she actually recalls as being
august of 76, we're still in the throes of what are those people doing
over there with that computing stuff, They don't tell us enough, we don't
know what's going on, You have to give us a better idea of what's
happening. Well, Connie came into that same environment, working for Lynn
bellamy and her responsibilities. Mhm went from probably fairly narrow,
make the students system work to run the administrative computing from a
programmatic and an application standpoint. And she did a wonderful job of
shaping up a group that seem to not be terribly professional and
understanding into one that knew that the customer needed to be taken care
of satisfied and provided for. And so Connie really moved the
administrative part of the computing house forward tremendously. Well,
that's right. Well, as time went on, your job seemed to change into uh
more narrow area than just running the main computer. Uh how about
describing how that transition took place and what was happening that
caused it. Well,
during all of this time, prior to Lynn and this group of people getting
here and moving forward until today, issue continues to grow. Um I want to
say that when I came there were maybe 40,000 students and of course, now
60,000, that's fairly significant and the growth of computing, not only
goes up with the body counts, but with the fact that during that same
period of time, more and more disciplines are finding things that they can
use the computer for. Uh statistics seem to be everywhere. And so just the
growth and to use the computer for developing statistical analyses would
be enough to make uh much more hardware intensive requirements. Come to
the forum at the same time, um you you have people wanting to do things
more independently. This what goes around comes around is very, very true
in computing. We started out with computers distributed in a lot of
different departments, We brought them together. Now during this period of
growth, microcomputers began to be significant on campus in the industry.
About what year was that happened?
The first microcomputers probably hit campus In 84, maybe a little bit
earlier, but the really big burst of microcomputers happened in 86
due to some
pricing and encouragement of academia by IBM. The the typical desktop
microcomputer which was in the $3504,000
range, was being offered to academia In the $2500 to $3,000 range. IBM has
always been really good about marketing to universities because they have
understood that universities are technology leaders. Um 60% discounts are
not unusual at any rate as a result of that, in the early part of of
86, we did in fact put in an order for, I think it was 500 ibms and we got
him by the semi truck trailer load and we took them into what was then a
fairly new building as I recall the basement of the business college
building. And the thing that I'm best known for with respect to that is
the tech shop which I was running had the responsibility for assembling
them, distributing them, getting them up and running. And my biggest
headache was the trash management because every computer has what appears
to be three times as much trash as it has good hardware. So we had a real
problem getting the dumpsters hauled away fast enough so that we could
keep doing the unpacking. But the whole change in computing was from a
total and absolute emphasis on big mainframes to now for many people a
complete turn about to doing desktop computing and Connie did a really
good job during this period of time of working with the advisory
committees. Two
mediate that discussion. As I say, some people, some of the biggest
researchers, those little computers, they don't do anything for us. We
have to have the Big Iron. And most people in terms of Headcount said well
the big Iron doesn't help me that much. I really want something that I can
control and manage. So the bottom line is we went through a period of time
where the big discussion was you got x million dollars, how much of it you
spend on Big Iron, how much of it you spend on desktops and oh by the way
, there are a few hardcore departmental oriented folks that there's
something called many computers that's kind of in between and we need some
of those two. So the idea of distributing the budget to these various
areas became a major discussion and eventually we, we did do a good job, I
think of distributing the funding, we continue to improve the big iron. We
had huge, wonderful programs that made many of the administrators happy
and definitely help the, the individual faculty by putting desktops on on
eventually every desk in the, in the university, you mentioned, Connie
McNeill was instrumental in that, but it seemed like she was working
administrative computing. But weren't these computers going out into the
faculty. But remember the, the timeframe, we're now up in the mid eighties
, like I say 86 when that, when those trucks backed up to our loading
docks. And at that point Connie was in the midst of being responsible for
the transition between
bosses and I, I don't remember enough of the exact, yeah, Lynn had had
gone back to the faculty ken, was
in the throes of following page to write state. And so the Connie was
there too, uh, be a central focus and, and make things move forward, given
all the turmoil of personnel turnover. It's amazing how smoothly things
actually did progress. Okay, You mentioned that you had the text shop and
you were setting up all these computers, mentioned how that came about
because tech shop is not mainframe that you were running when you got here.
Tech shop telecommunications is a topic. That that's another one of those
things morph. Um as we began to develop the big IBM iron, we've now phased
out the univac, we now have IBM on both the academic administrative side
of the house. The, the idea of people having access to that with other
than decks of cards was very important and as a matter of fact, dumb
terminals were the primary means of accessing the big iron um for IBM they
like to think of it as IBM 32 seventies.
Other folks said, well you can use cheaper asking terminals if you do some
other twisting your mouth and crossing your fingers and so forth. And so
the bottom line is, we began to build networks of, of dumb terminals
across the campus. Um,
the tech shop
was involved with doing that part of things as well, that is the actual
running of cables across campus. Getting those dumb terminals connected,
making that happen. And it was a small leap then from tech shop to, we
really have to uh take more seriously this whole idea of networking um
coincidentally similar time in the history of computing and things of that
sort. The National Science Foundation put out some solicitations for large
supercomputers, I think there were like 10 or 12 of them that were funded
and one of those was in Colorado. Um others were at other major university
locations around the country. They put out a second solicitation um two
allow networks to be built around each of those supercomputer centers so
that the supercomputer could be accessed and used by a larger cadre of
academic folks. And so the fact is that it was in this same time frame. As
a matter of fact, it ended up being very coincidental with our first major
IBM desktops that a s you got involved with a group called West Net based
around the supercomputer at the University of Colorado. And we got our
first I. Cisco router router is just advice that ties terminals on one
side to a network and goes out to wonderful places all over the country on
the other side. And this, this was a very dramatic shift and that's when
the text shop sort of turned into an organization that
justifies the term telecommunications at the same time. The director
purchasing George Morel said, you know, one of the things that
communications is involved with his voice. And I've got us west over here
that we sort of right purchase orders to and they do the wiring of the
campus and whatever for voice. And so George. And Lynn Had early on
decided that well, maybe it was a good idea to move that across. So I
think it was probably 1980 for just prior to all of this other stuff
happening that the idea of the telephone service is reporting to somebody
in computing. And it turns out that that eventually became a part of the
telecom group that I put together. Um It was a very, very rapidly moving
when you look back at it in retrospect, but it seemed like uh it was just
a natural progression to begin to move these things together. And then of
course, over a period of time that became a significant part of the
telecom activity,
we put together a bid in Probably 84 85 to rewire the campus
to take into account all of this change that had been going on two,
put more of a label on the
computer terminals, the pcs that were acting as terminals and then
eventually acting as stand alone computers. That could also be a part of
the larger computing network on campus. And also this whole connection to
the National Science Foundation network which was tying all the
universities in the country together. And so I don't remember that there's
an exact date where we said this is it or the org chart changed, but in
this time frame, 84 85 86 we joined West Net. We got our first router. We
began to do the groundwork to rewire the campus and by February of 86 we
had rewired the campus uh I think the AT&T contract was somewhere around
$8 million. and we essentially joined many of our peers in the new era of
being a networked university as opposed to a stand alone node somewhere
who was doing the talking with this node, what what activities academic
units were using that supercomputer
network. Initially it was very, very limited. The name that stands out in
my mind as our first serious user.
He helped promote it and he was really a thorn in our side because if he
was unhappy, our entire user community wasn't happy with some other star
field Sumner um literally wanted to work, collaborate with some peers, I
want to say it was in Illinois, but at any rate, um he was the driving
force that motivated me to make sure that the internet was a and the
internet at that time was the NSF net. The NSF net was a few nodes around
the country. Places where interchange of data took place and both A S. U.
And the U. Of a shared a 56 kilobit link to the University of Utah, which
is our closest NSF node. Uh and we shared that for a couple of years. Then
we went to a T. One which is 1.544 megabits. And then of course now we're
at gig ranges and nobody knows how much data is flowing.
Uh there's a term that you might explain here and that's bandwidth
bandwidth. Well, I just sort of alluded to it, bandwidth
is a little bit like water pressure except it's data.
If you have low bandwidth, it means you can get a small amount of data
through a communications link over any given period of time. 56 kilobits
of data is pretty limited. 100. Uh, megabits is significant more and it's
literally just numerically that difference. But the whole idea of
bandwidth is how much water pressure do you need to put the fire out the
fire being what people want to do in terms of using the data at a remote
location and the bandwidth that a issue users today is several gigabits
per second and I'm remote enough from it. Now, I don't know the exact
number, but it's a big number compared to that original 56 kilobits. So
you were in charge of this tech shop and telecommunication. The tech shop
was a piece of the telecommunications department. It was the original
piece and then it was surrounded by other people in the network. And when
we got into networking now it wasn't dumb terminals. It was little
computers known as routers, bigger computers known as other kinds of
communications boxes. But it's all based upon being able to move data from
one place to another without losing it. And with integrity from the
standpoint of if you send it, you know, it'll get there. We're going to
talk more about the modification to old main, but you might just mention
how old main played into this. Rewiring of the campus. Old main was
integral to that from the standpoint of all of the wiring from US West
came off of university into Old Main and then from Old Main was
distributed to the individual desktops, telephones on the campus. The US
West actually had some hardware in Old Main it was called a stepper switch.
It simply was a piece of the central office that was over on Mill avenue
that they put on our premises for efficiency purposes. But the idea is
that calls come in, it's a little bit like the router on the data side
calls come in. It causes a stepper to do certain things and the connection
is made then directly to your office telephone or going the other
direction out um having all of the wiring from US West Homed in Old Main
means it's the only logical place to rewire the campus and use that as the
hub for the rewiring. So in fact that's what happened. Um We took out the
step or switch and put in the AT&T. System 85. We
improve the frames where all of the wires come together in a separate room
across the hall from that switch and we upgraded the wiring from not just
the twisted pair for the telephone but we put in the co ax to deal with
other networking and we put in some fiber initially dark that is not being
used in order to plan for some future activity. I imagine you used the
utility tunnels which I imagine are getting quite full of stuff. The
utility tunnels were integral to this and there are some places where
I couldn't crawl through them anymore. I'm too big. Um Art Cantrell which
is one of my staff was a little bigger than I and so you'd have to go back
up on top and come in from the other side. But yes the utility tunnels uh
A. S. U. Was unbelievably fortunate that whoever set up the initial
physical plan was really of forward thinking person. Most of the utility
tunnels on campus are eight ft by eight ft and that's
not huge but on the other hand it's nice size, you can put a lot of stuff
down there and the stuff that's down there are things like chilled water,
steam lines and the communications electrical
and so from that standpoint it made it the only place that we could in
fact deal with
rewiring the campus. We I would like to have pulled out all of the old US
West wiring simply because it takes up space and spaces critical issue. Um
but untangling
all of that old wiring when you're trying to put new wiring in was just
Not 10able. We've taken out pieces of it here and there at some choke
points. Um but there's some real large amount of copper laying dead down
there in those tunnels right now. You mentioned Russ nelson having
initiated some networking with the refs might describe Russ was our first
president that
appreciated technology. Um,
he wasn't technologist, but he understood the fact that technology, it was
a way to multiply our abilities in the realm of communication. And so
computing services was fiddling around internally with a system called
props, electronic mail, calendar ring. Some things of that sort and I
believe it was probably ken Pollack talking to Russ um,
about this and and rest as well. Would that help me communicate with my
direct reports with the VPs? And of course ken said yes and he worked with
Russ enough to get rushed to say, well I think you should make that happen.
And so kind of as a back door computing services can Ordered enough dumb
30-70 terminals to outfit all of the VPs and some other reports um, with
these terminals and they were installed, tech shop telecom, they were
installed
in some cases over the objections of some of the VPs. Um, some of the VPs
I suspect never used them, their direct reports. Their principal clerical
staff would type whatever needed to be typed in, it would print out,
Brother needed to be read, but over time that became the motivating force
for the administration tumbling down. Uh, this idea of, of electronic
communications to the entire campus and once you sort of begin that
process, it's a little bit like the snowball rolling downhill, picks up
more snow and momentum and of course today everybody is using them. Upper
administration support. You mentioned Russ, any others in the president's
office or the provost's office that you'd give credit to and moving things
along technology wise. Well, I I didn't have that much direct contact with
most of the upper management. Um I was close enough to it that I, I could
see it and smell it and touch it and things of that sort. But I I didn't,
I didn't get in on the inside discussions but Russ probably, as I said
earlier was the first, but I think everyone sends him has been aware that
this is really important stuff. Our institution can't live without this
stuff. Um they became aware that if the student system is down, we're in
rough shape, if the payroll system is down, we're in rough shape. And so I
, I think that we've had really pretty, pretty significant support from um
the President's office and from whichever VP happened to be responsible
for the technology ever since. Um, it's been a pretty pretty sound
environment from that standpoint, some of the leaders in computer services
,
you might comment on anyone. I'm Lynn bellamy
ken Pollack, Connie MacNeil lee alley. Well Lewis, Adrian, Lynn, Lynn, um
I've known the longest obviously because I knew him in Toledo as well as
here at issue and
Lynn is um probably the most entrepreneurial of that set of people that I
knew personally and I didn't know Adrian personally, although I I met him
um but Lynn was always ready to suggest some crazy thing
and
the Madison avenue running up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes was
kind of his way of operating. And one of my jobs with Lynn, my
relationship with Lynn was to tell him when nobody's saluting, let's not
go too far down that road. Um ken was a solid manager, he had good
instincts and he
was more
a regular guy type manager. As far as I was concerned, the space
requirements needed by the different operations and computer services. How
did that? Well snowball
once again
this goes back literally to pre Lynn even, but the fact is you had
computing folks spread out in many, many different locations and when you
tried to bring that together around centralized hardware, uh they still
were spread out, but as Connie came along and admin grew and as the
academic grew we had more and more staff required and they were literally
all over the place, We had people in West hall, we had people in A. S. B.
We had people in the more building, we had people in the um motel out
along university, we had people in engineering um name another building,
we probably had some people there. And so the thing is growth is wonderful
but it has its real issues with respect to management and organization and
so during this entire period of time there was a growing interest in how
can we get these people in one place and over time we move people into
fewer locations, but we still didn't have them all in one place. And so
literally somewhere in this time frame, I mean we had, we had my telecom
group in mobile homes along Palm Walk for, I don't know, five years or
whatever it was. So somewhere in this time period there was a real
developing concept of how do we get all these people together? How do we
create a collegial atmosphere, not just a collegial attitude among these
folks and that's where the concept of the computing commons came from. Can
we do something to get all the staff together in one place to get all of
the key elements of what we provide is services available so we can
showcase them in one place and eventually that led to the commons and now
back to lee alley. How did he play into? Well, lee ali was an anomaly in
the hole sequence of things. With respect to computing. Um,
a replacement for ken Pollack I guess was, was the motivation, the
national search. Um, there were, I don't know of a significant number of
applicants. Um lee was in the final three, I wasn't on that committee, I
wish I would have been um
lee is probably one of the two or 3 most entrepreneurial talkers that I
know,
um
not a lot of substance but he could he could say the right things but he
just really had no people skills or leadership skills and
you can't be in a position as important as the head of computing with that
skill set. So lee, thank you. Being a good talker. Did one useful piece of
work for computing services I. T. Whatever you wanna call it. Uh During
his tenure
he put together the presentation and almost entirely on his own. He put it
together that sold the regions on the commons. He did a really good job of
selling it And they said, well is that everything you need? And he says
well no, but it's you know, the reasonable thing, they said come back next
month and tell us what you really need. And so he came back and he really
sold them on the commons. Uh they poured the money out and that's the only
thing that I would give him pat on the back and a handshake. Other than
that it was it was miserable working for the alley period. Let me finish
up just one point about that thing with the building and league, the staff
had done all the real work to to rationalize justify, make the case for
the building. But what I was saying previously is that lee put the gloss
on, he put the lipstick on, he he did the hairdo, he made it really
attractive to the regions, the staff had done the work. But lee really
cleaned it up and made it happen. Well, Connie probably had the biggest
space problems with scattered of people and Connie's staff was really
scattered to the wind it seemed. Yeah, so she was probably pushing more
for that. Absolutely, absolutely.
Then we come to Connie, you might say some words about Connie. Connie is
just one of the really refreshing people that, along with Lynn and myself
and Barbara and a few others made up the core team that I think back on as
making computing happen today. Issue. Um Smart, knowledgeable. Um but
congenial, I mean it's the sort of thing that you can argue and have
difference of opinion and then you say, well okay we've agreed. Now let's
let's move forward. It's kind of like the things that don't happen in
Congress these days and people reflect back on some of the old days when
people would argue and then go out and have a beer after dinner. Bill
Lewis bill is a different animal altogether. Um
Bill's heart is in engineering and that's understandable. That's where he
spent most of his career. Um He did a good job for continuing two have the
technology aspects of the University of the I. R. M. The I. T. Whatever we
want to call it, move forward. But he was in a time warp
in terms of doing dramatic things where budgets were getting tight. I mean
in the early days we had money as I think some others have commented the
provost at the end of the year would say, well we saved a little bit of
money here, um what do you need? And so the money wagon would bend would
back up and you'd do the really neat stuff by the time Bill got involved
with things that hardly ever happened anymore. Um
things like moving into the building, we argued about having the operating
funds to open it times were a lot tougher, but but Bill did a good job of
keeping the organization together and keeping the momentum moving forward.
Barbara Bradford, um she was really tough to deal with. Um Mhm Barbara
came into the organization because she was really cute and Lynn liked her
and cut that out.
Um
I I don't know exactly how Lynn became aware of Barbara but he was clearly
aware of her business acumen and and recruited her, he went after from the
architectural college and by the way you called that she came from the
dark side of campus architecture.
Well, you know the thing is you, you you, I have to give people a little
bit of a hard time once in a while, you know it, you know that the entire
issue environment
for a long, long time has been in my opinion, a very collegial environment
,
People want to help each other, they want things to be fun, they want
things to be enjoyable, they want success to be a pleasure not a job. And
Barbara came into the, the I. T. Organization um and took care of things
from the business standpoint so that people like me that don't like to
work with, budgets didn't have to and that's important. I mean I like to
go do technology, I like to go do some other people things maybe, but I
don't like to do budgets, I'd like to get things accomplished. The last
name I have on the list is Darryl s bach about describing him. Um
who knows?
Um
I'm a person that really could have been a mechanical engineer I think um
I think that way I feel that way I I see most situations as problems that
need to be solved and
if you do enough analysis and you have a modicum of money, you ought to be
able to make things work. Uh Now in addition to that, I see the manager
whatever level as someone who really needs to deal with the people issues
, most of the technology issues and other things that managers deal with
in terms of programs and projects,
you should be able to figure that out and if you can get the funding make
it happen. But the things that are really tough are dealing with the
people and managers that have been really successful and I'll pick on the
person who is not anywhere near Lynn bellamy, he was really successful
because he knew how to deal with people. Sometimes it's a carrot,
sometimes it's a stick, Sometimes it's a kick upside the head. Lynn
bellamy
Fired Me one day because I got to
brush about why we weren't doing things the right way. I'm an engineer and
I know the right way, why aren't we doing them the right way? And mm hmm,
he had a hard time doing it. But he said, I think you probably should look
for a new job now, fortunately because of another really important person
today. Issue that only lasted for about two weeks. George Morel and Lynn
had a discussion or two and I don't know if it's an intervention or just a
discussion. But at any rate, Lynn said, I think if you're looking for
another job, you probably ought to quit doing that. And so we went back
and I was a little more respectful after that. Um but the bottom line is
that he really knew how to deal with people. Uh and there are some others
around that do a good job. As a matter of fact, it was just when I just
mentioned George Morel, he was wonderful working with people knowing what
the rules are, knowing when to bend them, knowing how far you can bend
them. But looking under the surface and my, my cut is that the better
leaders are people who know the people part of it. Uh really well, a s U
employees who would, you would like to give credit. Well, you know a issue
is a very big organization and there's just a tremendous number of people
um We've had wonderful experiences with uh some of the Deans. Uh I enjoyed
Dean Thompson even though I didn't work with him that much. Um I enjoyed
dan brink. He was one of the people that I worked with on advisory
committees and things of that sort of lot. Ah But across the board, the
bulk of the people you run into at a. S. U. Over the long haul have been
just really really a pleasure to work with any other achievements that
issue that you would mentioned. Well, there's a couple of things that I
think very fondly of. Um
I started a thing
called the Aztec Free Net and I didn't start it but I was the instigator
probably a better term at one of the West Net meetings. Um We were talking
about things that are going on in the industry and in peoria Illinois, a
group had started a thing called a Free Net. Now this is back before the
internet, before NSF net was widely available, things that sort of was
back in the dial up days, strictly dial up and it was an attempt by
university types to get the community involved with computers and and a
little bit of networking
and what they did is they devoted some hardware resources and some
programming resources and allowed people to have dial in access and
eventually uh to have access to what we think of as the web. And I talked
to a lot of people at a issue about it would be neat to have a free net
here in Arizona. And then I got braces and I talked to people that were my
contacts at deck and A T and T. And they were fairly encouraging and I
remember I had, I've been having these kinds of sort of casual discussions
for almost a year. One of them said, well what are you going to do
something about this? Pathologies? This is fresh bok procrastinating again
, isn't it? So at any rate I called a meeting, I asked everybody that I
knew that it had shown any interest at all And we had two or 3 meetings
and I said, well here's the problem. I have a little bit of resource that
I can, at my own discretion throw into this. I've got some staff that if
we needed a little programming help we could get it. And I have some staff
that we needed some hardware looked at, we could take advantage of that.
But we don't have any hardware with Dick said we'll give you a vax
if you'll shut up and do this. They didn't say it that way. It was very
nice and a T and t said we can we can supply some communications gear. And
so the thing is on the basis of kind of gifts from those two locations,
those two companies, we had a meeting down at the
grade school down at rural and ready for school. No it's it's at the
offices there at southern and rural.
23 offices and There were probably 10 or 12 people there. And I said this
is gonna be it, we're gonna fish or cut bait tonight. And we had what was
the organizational meeting and pretty much everybody was there became an
officer of one sort or another or had an assignment and my responsibility
was to move forward. That free Net
is technically still in existence. It has moved away from A. S. U. And
it's totally on its own. Uh it's different than what we had originally set
up. But the point is that it was a wonderful experience to see how you can
mobilize people and get like minded interest to really do something of
significance.
one of the other really good memories is that
when we were getting ready for the dedication of the commons building, we
were talking about who could we have as keynote speaker and we kicked
around names like al gore vice president, he was being touted as a big
supporter of networking and all that sort of stuff for some reason. I was
personally a little bit put off by that because he was a politician, not a
really technologist. So at any rate I happened to mention to um well I
mentioned I talked to my A T. And T rex and I said you know what would be
really nice is to have some big technologist from A T. And T. Keynote this
thing. Um is there someone that might well anyway, the A T. And T. Guy
said, what would you think about the head of Bell Labs? I said well that
sounds pretty good. Um who's the head of Bell Labs? Well, there's this
fellow called Arno Penzias, he's a nobel laureate, he's the one that
discovered the background radiation of the universe. And so a couple of
weeks later the guy came back and said we've talked to Bill Labs and
in the time frame that you're talking about for this dedication we think
we can get our no do you want to get our known? And so we had Arno Penzias
as the keynote speaker for the dedication. He and Laddie were
pretty interesting pair and then one other technologist and and this is
the wonderful thing about working in this environment. one other
technologist that is just a blow your mind person is vinton cerf, he is
the he's the real inventor of the internet, he's the one that had t shirts
made up I pee on everything I. P. Standing for internet protocol. Um
vintage is a real intellectual Arnaud is an unbelievable intellectual,
having dinner with either of those guys is like being entertained by
someone that you just can't imagine how smart they are at any rate. Uh
those are the sorts of things that are really really fond memories of A. S.
U.
Okay well how about since you retired? When did you retire by the way? It
all depends on you know we're having such fun. Well
there's a lot of little things but basically it was time I retired in
phases. I one of those people that had a lot of vacation time accrued. And
I had heard
a news report about jimmy carter president carter ah having an annual
habitat. Big do he would go out and help build houses for a week or
something of that sort. I said you know that's really a neat thing and for
a president to do that that's really I I ought to do something useful like
that. I'm getting old enough that I don't have anything much more to do
with the issue and whatever. But a year later I heard the same news report.
Well of course it was a year later news report. I said you know once
again you are really a good procrastinator. You've managed to put this off
for a whole year. And so
I looked up the local habitat. I went to an orientation meeting the next
saturday and I started becoming, yeah Barbara went with me and and it was
very encouraging about all this. I think it it helped a lot at any rate.
The bottom line is that I started volunteering at habitat. Well, that tied
to the fact that I had a lot of accrued vacation time. I started taking
Fridays off of his vacation days and doing habitat on Fridays. It was a
little less noisy and little more orderly. Um, to, to do that. And so I, I
, I did that. And then, um, I think it was 2002, I officially went to
halftime and the idea of going to halftime was too
allow some budget relief for the department and still kind of care take
some of the things that were going on. And when I went to halftime, I said
, well, you know, I could do more than just Fridays now. So I kind of
geared up the habitat stuff And then eventually a couple of years later I
retired fully and Have transition to about four days of work at Habitat.
And when did you move into the community that you're in now? Oh, geez,
when did I move into a friendship village
2003.
I had to be 60 to get in there. Yeah. You need to, you need
be a little bit older. And, but that wasn't the big consideration. Big
consideration was barber and I decided that we got along a lot better if
we live separately. And so I said, I don't want to move again. So I'm
going to move someplace. It's semi terminal. I have one other topic. We'll
just insert it somewhere. But Y, two K. Y. Two K.
Y. two K. stands for
the unknown. And literally I think that's that's what it really ended up
being. Most people we weren't sure of what was going to happen.
Systems are so complicated
that almost no one knows how they really work under the covers. Um I'm old
enough so that there was a time when you had a wrench and a couple of
pliers and maybe even a small hammer you could work on an automobile. But
today you gotta have a computer, you gotta have some reference tools. Um
The average person can't yeah deal with what's under the hood of an
automobile and even the way above average person doesn't know for sure
what code is hidden somewhere in the back of a major application that
might have a date dependence and that's what caused all the fur off your
about why to gain as it turns out we were fortunate almost no systems were
that fragile and life went on very pleasantly.
Your career has spanned the history of computers I would say almost it um
Yes it's been I really feel like I can look back and see Computing when I
first got into it in 63 as truly in its infancy. There were computers
before that. Um But they were very specialized. But the technology of
computing and everything has been a tremendous development and it's
wonderful when it works. Thank you for the interview and thank you for
your service. There is one other quick thing I want you to know, but logos
are really important.
I
made ties, I'm wearing one today. I made ties for my staff. Once we
established the telecom,
this mug was handed out to everyone at A. S. U. When we rewired the campus.
It has references to most of the various um peace parts of the technology
that were involved with that. And those kinds of symbols are just really a
part of what's important in terms of people getting on board. They think
about the red book or the logo or those sorts of things. Almost as much as
they think about really what's going on except when it doesn't go on. And
then they think about that exclusively. Thank you. Thank you.