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IX. The B5000 Algol Project

Barton continued to be the most powerful force behind the B5000 even though he was on the outside, looking in, and only spending half of his time with Burroughs. I had spent many hours with him, essentially sitting at the feet of the Master. When he asked Lloyd and me to move to Pasadena to work on the B5000 Algol project, I jumped at the chance.

But Lloyd played it cool. He talked about everything from how much he loved Dallas to how good his wife's job was. He finally said that he would come for $900 per month. I thought that was the most obscene thing that I had ever heard. I tried to point out to him that he was blowing a great opportunity, but he would not change his mind. I am pretty sure that $900 per month was more money than Barton was making from Burroughs.

I moved to California in October, 1960 and started studying Algol and the B5000. My arrival brought the size of the Automatic Programming Section to 11 people. That seemed more than enough to do any meaningful job. Brad McKenzie was my Section Manager. Other members were Dick Berman, Ken Meyers, Molly Chalkley, and Larry Sturges.

I have loved California from my first trip until today. Bob Barton and Bill Lonergan and I played tennis at least 45 Sundays out of the first 52 that I spent in California. We never once had to cancel out because of bad weather. We always played doubles. Our fourth varied from one Sunday to the next. It was frequently Don Stevens or Bob Forrest. When Lonergan was lured away from Burroughs by Univac (they increased his salary from $20000 per year to $40000) Barton and I started playing singles about four or five times each week. I always felt that I was better than Bob, but he always won. I tried everything to beat him. One day I did some arithmetic and figured that Bob and I had played over 2000 sets of tennis. I had won four. Bob was getting sadistic. He used to taunt me on the tennis court, saying things like "Come on, can't you do better than that". I would get so damned mad at him that I could have killed him. One day in particular I was really seeing red. My serve was the best part of my game. I decided that I was going to hit him right between the legs with my next serve. I hit that serve so hard that I know he never saw it. It hit its mark. He dropped like a shot. I said "Do you want to play or not". One night he called me from Indianapolis and asked me if I would play tennis with him the next day. I said that I was tired of getting beaten and that it wasn't any fun anymore. We haven't played since then.

I was convinced that I had seen the last of Lloyd. But by some set of circumstances that were incomprehensible to me, they actually offered Lloyd $900 per month to move to Pasadena and be the B5000 Algol Project Leader. I remember thinking to myself, "My God. Just think of the responsibility that he is taking on by accepting that much money."

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Lloyd arrived in Pasadena in January, 196I. We were still enjoying the success of the 205 Fortran project. My feeling was that if we could write a Fortran compiler in nine months that we could damn near walk on water. With the B5000 we had a beautiful machine designed expressly for a beautiful language. We even had Barton around to help out if we needed him. To put it bluntly, we were in Fat City. But a strange thing happened. We did not know where to begin. We were finally able to get the project going with the inventions of the Algol Syntax Chart and Recursive Descent. Separate chapters of this document are devoted to those two topics.

One of the most important lessons that Barton had taught me during that amazing day when he and Toni came to Dallas, was that the quality of a program comes from its design. Programming and debugging are things that are tacked onto the end of the project and should not occupy more than a small percentage of the time. We didn't have a B5000, but we had all of the blackboards, and chalk that we could use.

We discussed every design in detail and drew very complete flow charts. Once we had the flowcharts, we did something that I called "Playing Computer". Basically we took many variations of the Algol 60 constructs and walked them through the flowcharts. I found a lot more bugs on the blackboard than on the computer. In later years, I heard Lloyd say that we had over designed the compiler. But I do not agree with him, if he was sincere.

As summer approached, Barton started telling us about this bright fellow that had worked for him at Shell Development in Houston and also during the summer of 1959 at Burroughs in Pasadena. I felt that it would be a nice gesture on our pant if we provided him with a summer job and gave him the benefit of our experience. His name was Dave Dahm. He had worked at Lockheed during the summer of 1960. Dave was at Princeton working on a Ph.D. His dissertation was in an area of topology called Knot Theory. Dave is the only person that I know that has seen Einstein in person.

When Dave showed up in Pasadena nearly everyone remembered him, even though it had been two summers since he had worked for Burroughs. They mostly remembered him as the fellow who would occasionally take a sharp pencil and reach 'up into the coffee machine and poke holes in the bottom of the cups. Dave always denied that he used to do that but his denials were never very convincing.

We showed Dave all of the things that we were doing, and we spent a very pleasant summer together. Dave was slow to accept the Algol Syntax Chart as a reliable tool, but he seemed to fully appreciate it, as well as all of the other interesting things that we were doing, by the end of the summer.

Then the fourth member of the group arrived. It was Fred

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Gerbstadt. I had a private office, which was smaller that a two person office. When Fred arrived I had to share it with him. I didn't like the loss of status, or the fact that Fred was always smoking something, or the fact that Fred always invited some people in to play chess for an hour or more at lunch time.

Fred didn't like it much when I would ask him to leave the office when I received a call from my girlfriend. But he handled that pretty well. What he couldn't handle was that I had an Accutron wrist watch that I was always bragging about. I had paid $171 for it. Fred had an $8 Timex. He used to drive me nuts by secretly setting his Timex about every two hours, and whenever we would call the time-of-day to check our watches, his would be more accurate than mine.

From the day that I graduated from high school I always had a nice watch of some kind. Shortly after I received my new watch as a high school graduation gift, the face got all fogged up. I was really concerned, so I caught a bus and went downtown to the jewelers where my parents had bought the watch. The jeweler took it apart and cleaned it up for me. Then he said "I'll tell you a little secret. If it ever happens again, instead of bringing it to me, just lay it on a bare light bulb for awhile".

One day Fred came to work and he said "Damn. The face of my Timex is all fogged up". I said "Don't worry. Just take it home tonight and lay it on a bare light bulb for awhile, and the heat will drive the moisture right out". I noticed that Fred was pretty quiet for the next several days. In fact he wasn't speaking to me at all. What neither of us had taken into account is that his cheap-ass Timex was mostly plastic. The face melted down all around the hands and the strap melted clear off. I guess it smelled awful. Anyway. he just knew that I had done that on purpose to get rid of his Timex that had been the chief instrument for his favorite joke.

The fifth and last member of the group was Bobby Creech. He was known as "The fellow that Lloyd Turner used to work for, but now works for Lloyd". Bob said that Lloyd never introduced him to anyone without telling them that Bob used to be his boss at Tempco Aircraft in Dallas. Lloyd had as much trouble getting Bob to leave Dallas as we had in getting Lloyd to leave Dallas. We knew that Lloyd really wanted Bob because he always talked so highly of him. Lloyd must have done a pretty good sales job on Bob also. When we were finally introduced, Bob said to me "My gosh, after all of the stories that I've heard about you, I thought that you would have at least three heads". I was obviously very complimented.

Dave returned for a formal interview before getting his Ph.D., but I felt that it was a foregone conclusion that he couldn't resist rejoining the Algol team. Dave wouldn't give Lloyd a firm answer during the interview. I invited Dave to spend a Saturday afternoon at my place. It was a beautiful California day, so we

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sat out or my patio in Sierra Madre and got drunk in the sunshine. Dave told me that he would love to work on the project, but he wanted $1000 per month, which was $100 per month more than I was making. I was really pleased with his admission, and I told Lloyd at the first opportunity. Lloyd asked how it would make me feel to be making less than Dave. I told him that it wouldn't bother me at all. So the rest was a formality. With Dr. David Dahm's arrival in June, 19E2, the team was assembled.

The last flowchart in my Algol Project Manual is dated 6/22/62. So that is when the design phase ended and programming began in earnest.

An unfortunate thing happened to Dave as soon as he arrived in California. Lloyd and I always tried to stay in room 101 of the Saga Motel during the four and a half months that we spent in Pasadena during the 205 Fortran project. We almost always got that room, because there was a lot of traffic noise and no one else wanted it. But we rarely ever slept anyway so it didn't bother use Besides, it was the best room in the motel for parties. Lloyd wanted the best for Dave while he was getting settled in Pasadena, so he got him a room at the Saga. I believe that it was Dave's first weekend in town that he decided to go to Hollywood Park to the horse races. All of his worldly possessions were in his room. That concerned him because he did not quite trust the people at the Saga. So he moved everything into his car and went to Hollywood Park. While he was there someone broke into his car and stole all of his worldly possessions.

My plan for writing the compiler was to write a kernel compiler in Algol, then play computer with our flowcharts and generate the object code that our eventual compiler would have generated. But that rigor did not hold up very long. I stuck to it longer than anyone else, but not all that long. We were programming in a terrible language called the Operating System Implementation Language (OSIL). Dan Brannies wrote the assembler. It ran on the 220 and generated a mess of cards that then had to be carefully arranged by hand. I think that Dave and Fred were the only ones that understood the complicated process well enough to go through it. Dave wrote some programs to help him put the mess together. If everything went, perfectly (which it rarely ever did), we could assemble the compiler in nine hours.

My area of the compiler was the scanner. It was a huge Stream Procedure with 32 parameters. carefully arranged in order. They were carefully arranged because it took one microsecond to access the first parameter: two microseconds to access the second, and so on until it took 32 microseconds to access the 32nd parameter. It was the function of the scanner to load a table called "TABLE" with strings of values representing tokens. The parsing routines would pick up the values and do their job on them. I had envisioned that the other guys would load dummy values in TABLE

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and debug their code in parallel with my debugging. But Dave insisted that they needed their input from the real scanner, so I had practically zero time to get my stuff debugged. I felt that I was bringing the entire project to a halt.

Jack Merner and John McNeely wrote a B5000 simulator that ran on the Philco 2000. We went to San Jose to the General Electric plant to use their Philco 2000. When we had to reassemble, we would drive to Stanford and use their 220. The night shift was supposed to shut down at midnight, but Lloyd could always convince them to stay until after 1:00 A.N. When they left we would go to Stanford and reassemble. I averaged three hours of sleep a night for weeks. It was the most grueling time of my life. There was no letup when the scanner started working. Just constant pressure from Lloyd and ourselves.

Finally we got the word that the B5000 was working. But it was working so poorly that we were better off on the simulator. Even when we switched over to the B5000, the pressure continued. Finally, one glorious day, the kernel compiler compiled itself successfully and repetitively. We were free from OSIL at last. Our turnaround time dropped from nine hours to four minutes. Our progress accelerated tremendously, but the pressure was still on.

There was no time for anything outside of work but eating and sleeping, and darned little of that. We worked over 100 hours every week. One day in July, I was wanting to order some tickets for the Riverside Grand Prix which was the last weekend in October. So I asked Lloyd, in the front of the rest of the group, if I could take off one weekend in October. They all thought it was funny as hell for me to ask for a weekend off four months in advance. It was a good thing that I asked. I really felt guilty when the weekend came and I was the only one that didn't have to work.

There was especially no time for any outside relationships. My wife and son packed their bags and went to Tulsa saying that they were not coming back until I asked them to. I never asked, so after several weeks she came back and we were divorced. Lloyd and his wife were divorced the same month. She moved back to Dallas. Bobby's wife moved back to Mineola, Texas and I assumed that that were getting a divorce, but I don't think that they ever did. Fred's wife refused to believe that he could be spending that much time at the office, so she concluded that he was seeing another woman. I remember Fred, almost pleading with Lloyd to be able to spend more time at home. Lloyd said ok, but nothing changed. I think Fred's wife left him for a short while, but I'm not sure of that. Dave didn't have any relationships outside of work at the beginning of the. project. and he didn't have time to develop any during the project. By the end of the project, our families were all back together again, temporarily. Now we are all divorced except for Bobby. The reasons for the divorces were not related to the project.

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About September, 1963 the compiler was completed. It was clearly the best compiler on earth. We were compiling a very rich language and generating good code at the rate of 1750 lines per minute. The next fastest compiler was about 400 lines per minute on a machine that was much faster than the B5000. But our compiler wasn't good enough. All of us, especially Lloyd, knew that we could do better. My pet project of writing the scanner, in a Stream Procedure had been a mistake. It caused all of our largest tables to be non-overlayable. We also knew of other improvements. So we started all ever again.

At this point, the five of us were the worlds best B5000 Algol programmers. Errors were something of the past. We literally rewrote every single Line of that compiler and debugged it, in three weeks. It was less than 6000 lines long. I wrote all six of the I/0 statement routines and the MONITOR and DUMP declarations. Remembering my American history, I called the MONITOR procedure MERRIMAC, with the comment, "THIS TIME THE MERRIMAC WILL HANDLE THE MONITOR". I am pleased to see that the name is still used in some compilers today. The six I/O routines required 900 Lines in the compiler. I believe that I had three syntax errors (keypunch errors) and one logic error. The logic error surfaced a few days later. All of my test cases ran correctly the first time. All of the other guys had similar experiences.

So we now had our "Lean and clean" compiler as Lloyd called it. So we junked the worlds best compiler it favor of a much better compiler. All of our large tables were overlayable. It would compile 2000 lines per minute and only occupied 4000 words of drum memory. The compiler could compile itself in three minutes. Stanford and other universities used to teach courses on that compiler.

The first inkling that I had that something was seriously wrong came from Bill Conlin. Bill was one of the few salesman that I had any respect for. He had made the effort and understood the B5000. Bill made same derogatory comment about the compiler. I couldn't believe my ears. So I took him to task. It turned out, that his complaint was with the MCP, and not the compiler. I had never thought that the MCP was very good, so I agreed with him. Actually, I never. thought that anything was of much value that the Algol. group didn't do. I discussed Bill's complaint with Lloyd, which started him thinking. Actually he had probably thought of this a long time before on his own. It became clear that the B5000 would never be viewed in the proper light if the ALGOL group didn't rewrite the MCP. Brad MacKenzie wouldn't hear of it. He was concerned for the feelings of the MCP group. Lloyd essentially went over Brad's head and offered his boss, Dean Holdiman, a deal. The five members of the Algol group would rewrite the MCP in our spare time (i.e. nights and weekends) if Burroughs would buy us five brand new Corvettes. They cost $5000 each. There was a period of several days. when I really thought that Burroughs was going to accept our offer. I thought that

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Dean was fighting for it and lost.

Then along came the Burroughs head-per-track disk. It gave Brad the excuse that he needed to allow Lloyd's group to write a new MCP without hurting the feelings of the MCP group. The[y] still had their hands full with the drum MCP. Unfortunately, Dave and I had come the point that we had lost our ability to work together. We had had too many arguments to continue.

The B5000 would .have clearly failed if it were not for the disk MCP. It, in combination with B5000 Algol was a thing of beauty.

I was given the job of turning the Algol compiler over to the maintenance group while the other guys were starting the disk MCP. I still have the notes for the class that I taught, along with the time spent on each subject. The class met from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. daily and started on October 3I, 1963. I spent 52.5 hours teaching the class. Every procedure in the compiler was covered. Our former documenter, Warren Taylor was the section manager in charge of maintenance. His project leader for Algol maintenance was John Skelton. I only recall one time that John ever came to me for help with a problem. I have never seen any statistics on the reliability of the compiler, but I have to think that it was excellent.

We were never paid one cent of overtime in any of its various forms. Brad told me that he didn't care if I didn't do anything for three months after the project was over. That is when I took up golf. So I was on the project two months before anyone else, and stayed on it six weeks after everyone else had left it.

I cannot give enough credit to Lloyd. He had a hard-headed group of angry young men to control. There was never a doubt as to who was in charge. He made every single decision himself. Lloyd Left Burroughs for a year and Bobby Creech made a very touching speech at his going away party. I wish that I could exactly recreate his words, because it captured my feelings exactly. He essentially said that Lloyd may be the most demanding taskmaster in the world. He invariably gets from his employees far more than they themselves thought that they were capable of. But in every case, when a former employee looks back on his career. he feels that the years spent with Lloyd were the most productive and in some ways, the most satisfying of his life.