AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER

== I grew up, the younger brother of two sisters, children of Rose and Samuel Chessin. My parents were immigrants from Ukraine, arriving separately about the turn of the century, were introduced by landsleit, married and raised three children.. I grew up on the west side in Manhattan. Neighbors included Babe Ruth (next door) and Roberta Peters, across the street, Lionel Stander and Jay and Larry Storch two blocks away.

== While in 6th and 7th grades of public school I was a member of Mr. Louis Wolfe's Saturday morning program, Kid Whizzards, on local NYC radio station WHN. It eventually turned into the Quiz Kids. Each Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Wolfe held a post-3 pm session during which he read aloud from books like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Count Luckner, Sea Devil", from Jules Verne and other such authors. Tuesdays almost no one went home to play on the streets!
PS 166, an old, Gothic-architectured building, on West 89th Street, (click for photo)   nestled among apartment houses and a stable for use of the Central Park equestrians. It was within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. More important, it was a 10-15 minute walk from 93rd Street and Riverside Drive, where I lived. Incidentally, not too many years before I graduated, the school graduated a kid named Jonas Salk. Mr. Colton, Principal, and Miss Banks, Asst. Principal, were very well-liked people in the school. My teacher in 8B5 at graduation was the inspiring, Mrs. Pollock .
My yearbook contained some interesting articles. One in particular was written by fellow classmate, Jimmy K, who stated his ambition "... to go to Hollywood and personally write scripts for Ameche, La Marr, Rooney, Power, or Mickey Mouse." He did. He became a writer for a very popular TV show, then director, and producer.
If you come across the yearbook, look at page 7, Class of June 1939, 8B5 picture. Second row from top, 6th in from your left. There I am. Jimmy K is next row down at my right. The yearbook also cited at least 3 graduates then attending Townsend Harris High School and at least 5 more who, having graduated THHS, were then attending college.

== Townsend Harris (photo) was a marvelous experience. Teachers who held Ph. D. degrees. Under the Board of Higher Education. Preparatory to CCNY. Four years' study in three (two and a half if coming in from junior high).
I recall, fondly, Robert H. Chastney, Acting Director, who guided us to the end; Russell F. Stryker and his squad of Latin teachers, Messrs. Roy Begg, Morris Diamond, Ed Sheldon, and Henry Standerwick who opened to us the beauty of the Latin language and its descendant - English; E. E. Penn and the English department (in particular, Max Smith) who gave us the desire to understand the complexities of English grammar, good composition, and an appreciation of the written and spoken word; Richard Emery and his colleagues in Social Science who illuminated the significance of the recession just ending and the war just beginning as well as the value of liberty in any society; Mr. Delgado Arias, our class advisor, who made learning Spanish a pleasure, along with his associates, Mr. Ernest Esperanza, in particular, who shared his liking for Xavier Cugat and new-comer, Desi Arnaz. Sid Schreiber, Iven Hurlinger, and Reinhard Wetzel made physics exciting; while Messrs. Carrie, Curry, Hurwitz, Mortola, Newman, and Hilsenrath made mathematics live and gave me direction for my future.
Sadly the school was shut down in 1942 by then Mayor LaGuardia. (I later ran into Mr. Joe Hilsenrath, working at the National Bureau of Standards, who had earlier created OMNITAB - the forerunner- of the spreadsheets Visicalc, Lotus1-2-3, Excel, etc.) ..... There is some information on Townsend Harris, first Consul General from the United States to Japan and founder of the Free Academy in New York City (to become College of the City of New York with its preparatory school named after him) to be found here.

== In my CCNY college days, I came across several personalities: on Broadway - Tallullah Bankhead (fraternity prank required my getting {which I did} a piece of her personal clothing!); served orange juice to Oscar Levant and to Jascha Heifetz (I worked at Carnegie Hall for a spell); was there that Saturday afternoon, November 14, 1943, when the 25 year old Leonard Bernstein substituted for Bruno Walter for his conducting debut with the NY Philharmonic; and was water-boy for infamous "Chief" Miller of the Lacrosse Team. A most fascinating class was that in the English Department, with the Irish Poet-Laureate, Padraic Colum, in charge. He and wife, Mary, close friends of James Joyce , told us so much of the Dubliners. In mathematics, among a few good instructors, one in particular still stands out - Emil Post - now recognized for being a co-founder of the theory of recursive functions.

== At the University of Wisconsin, I was fortunate to study mathematics under Professor Rudolph Langer and took a course under C. C. MacDuffee and Max Dehn. Prof. Harold Taylor, then of the Philosophy Department, was inspirational -- no doubt leading to his appointment as President of Sarah Lawrence University - then the youngest such in the nation. Although we didn't know it at the time, Prof. Ulam,working in Chicago on the Manhattan Project, had assigned some of us undergraduates, "grunt" work solving some differential equations. And of course, there was Coach Harry Stuhldreher and the Badgers- Harry of Notre Dame's Four Horseman fame. And the Ratskellar where beer was permitted to be served on campus!!

== My two years at Columbia University were quite interesting as Prof. Eilenberg (part of the Bourbaki crowd) was developing his work in Algebraic Topology and tested it in class.

== I was fortunate to meet and marry the former Elaine Klein, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Irving Klein, New Rochelle. Now I needed to work.

== Cooper Union, under math department head, Fred Miller,  offered a young math teacher an excellent opportunity to learn as well as earn. Since this private school provided scholarship to each student, the classes were exciting challenges. Desiring to put some of my knowledge to field work, I took summer jobs in industry and eventually left full-time teaching to join a leading edge technology group in the defense area.

== The Air Arm Division of the Westinghouse Corporation had recently been established in Baltimore, just outside Friendship International Airport, when my resume arrived. Requiring a "professional" mathematician, the company hired me. Here I was first exposed to analogue computers (REAC) and later to digital computers (IBM). Thanks to such astute engineers as Bob Raven, I bridged over from "academic" mathematics to "practical" math. My curiousity was greatly satisfied as I was engaged across the development groups in a broad variety of mathematical applications. These included statistics (noise theory) and war gaming. During this period I attended U of Maryland towards completing requirements for the doctorate, and taught both internally at Westinghouse, and at nearby Johns Hopkins. A summer hire, Prof. Frank Sevier, of Rutgers U (Camden) invited me to become a speaker in his pre-PBS "University of the Air" Series. I had three one-half hour shows on mathematics 9 in the morning!! My experiences are summarized in the article "Spies, Housewives, and Electric Chairs", Am. Math. Monthly, vol 65, no. 6, page 416. We later authored a text briefly used in the Mathematics Department at Rutgers.

Also during this period, I became involved with the newly organized Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, S.I.A.M., as its Book Reviews Editor.

== At this time our twin sons, Andrew and Zachary arrived on the scene ( we were somewhat prepared since Elaine's younger sisters, Joan and Jan, were also twins). Another happy event was winning a fellowship from NSF which enabled me to wind up the work and obtain the final degree. Prof. Elliot Montroll, Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics, was my mentor. In my final year, Dr. Montroll was away on a Guggenheim Fellowship, so Prof. J. B. Diaz helped me through the topic selected. The thesis dealt with "Free Radicals" - a study of molecular states at extremely low temperatures. The study was aimed at refining earlier results obtained by Montroll and Jackson. An abbreviated version of the thesis appeared in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 31, No. 1, July 1959.

== Armed with a Ph. D. and wanting to get out of the business of war gaming and other secret "war work", I applied to IBM -- the leader in its industry . 1959 - Sputnik, Vanguard, NACA becoming NASA - I was hired and put onto IBM's Project Mercury team. This put me into the Federal Systems Division - a part of IBM dealing in government-sponsored, (i. e., usually non-commercial) leading-edge development.

==My career at IBM was a very pleasant series of assignments. I liked to "solve problems" and that led me to view my jobs as "assignments". These included managerial tasks, developmental tasks, educational, marketing, and a few others I can't recall.

== My first job was to learn how to program the IBM 709-7090. My teacher, Gerald Weinberg , was excellent, many of his lessons carried through for decades. The languages were symbolic assembly language and FORTRAN. Another significant person in my development, was the recently transferred IBM Fellow (in mathematics) - Dr. Bernard Dimsdale. (Aside from the lunch time cribbage games we played, he taught me a good deal about project management.)

== My first assignment on Project Mercury was to work with consultant, astronomy Prof. Paul Herget, an authority on orbit calculations. (I had done some orbit calculations on double stars at Wisconsin, as an astronomy minor). My part of the team effort was the "real-time" calculations of the capsule future location in free fall in order to deliver that data to the tracking stations ahead for aiming the radar antennas. The scientific challenge arose from the mismatch between the assumptions of theoretical celestial mechanics and true free fall over a distributed, non-homogeneous, attractive mass (earth) in a non-vacuum. Project Vanguard had provided some parametric data and the differences between prediction and true position led to some revisions in the dimensions and shape of the earth. Very exciting stuff to present in conference during the International Geophysical Year. Click here for some vintage photographs.
So, my part of the World Wide Acquisition, Tracking and Ground Information Subsystem IBM was engaged to produce, began with the capsule "GO" decision after launch. Prior to that the program predicted the landing site if an "ABORT" was ordered. Through the orbit, the program produced look-ahead data for the tracking stations and what-if data regarding splash down. I am happy to report that the algorithm employed together with the assumptions and parameters chosen, more often than not allowed for accurate splash downs.
Once the project got this far, two other tasks involved me: the Post Flight Analysis Data Reduction program, which essentially allowed for a more refined collection of algorithms for more comprehensive treatment of the telemetry input, and support for the Computer-based world-wide simulation subsystem to train the operators at the tracking stations.
I suppose what with the work I was doing, someone elected to have me cited in a scientific "Who's Who in America" .. I never bought the volume that went along with the mention. (This was repeated later when I resided in California, only then it was "Who's Who in the West", and again "Who's Who in Science"... I was always embarassed by those citations since my work was essentially trivial mathematics and am happy that they are no more.)

== My next assignment took me to the IBM Systems Research Institute in NYC, to share my Mercury knowledge ("real-time" mathematical programs) with the systems engineers in the field. I met IBMers from Japan, Germany, U. K., Australia. I never suspected that I would meet some of them again.

== I returned to the Federal Systems Division to work in the area (seriously called) Intelligence, with several of the "3-letter" Agencies, preparing the analysts there for the data processors ordered. Interesting to see our security people operate. (I didn't last too long.) But my next assignment was in internal education, first in teaching elements of "systems analysis", some programming on the IBM system 3, and in preparing the way in FSD for the IBM System 360. I wrote a few books on these subjects for internal use. Then --- I was given an invitation I couldn't resist.

== I left the domestic (USA) IBM company to accept the position as manager of the IBM World Trade System Center in San Jose, California, moving my family to Los Altos. The job was challenging in that I was not in development but attached as a conduit for supporting world wide systems engineers both in handling questions about those systems and programs developed there and in preparing for announcements of new programs and systems. San Jose was the home of storage devices (Amdahl had just left IBM) and those two unusual computers - the IBM 1130 (scientific) follow on to the IBM 1620 and the IBM 1800 (DACS). A departure from the general commercial world served by the all-encompassing IBM 360.
In this position, I was able at one time to have a team of WTC personnel develop for the 1130 the WTC Report Program Generator - RPG program needed in Europe. I travelled widely to Europe and to Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia as well as to Mexico, holding internal pre-announcement classes and occasionally making customer calls. At this time I began running into some of those chaps who had attended SRI while I taught there. In addition, I kept running into one fellow, a former student from Cooper Union, on trips to London (he knows whom I mean).
I learned to enjoy California wine, began to appreciate Asian culture, feasted on the Old World offerings and had an education few could achieve... at company expense... Another interest I pursued was hypnosis. Elaine's physician, in an effort to help his patients, undertook to teach some of them self-hypnosis. After attending a few classes and experiencing the trance state, I took it seriously, studied, and eventually became a member of the South Bay Group of Ethical Hypnotists - working with and under doctor supervision. ...Very interesting... I taught a few friends but now I no longer do that. Anyhow...
With the transfer to Boca Raton, Florida, of some major systems development (IBM 1130 and 1800 and follow ons) and to Rochester (5100 series), I accepted the position of Manager, SE development at WTC Hqtrs in White Plains, NY.
We moved to Harrison, New York, re-acquainting ourselves with friends and family.

== At WTC Hqtrs, there was need for many tools for the distant Systems Engineers - in particular, the need for the rapid exchange of technical information to support the highly technical SEs (almost all held degrees in mathematics). The IBM Field Engineering Division had solved this problem for itself by developing a world-wide communication system tieing terminals by dedicated phone lines to a storehouse of data (magnetic drums). Seeking information, the FE remotely searched for the data.
We in Systems Engineering Tools Development adapted this to produce a "communication system" of sorts by providing each SE with a "mail box" on the drum. The SE would "mail" a query into a central "mailbox". This box would be "opened" by Hqtr technicians, problem understood and solved, and the solution "posted" to the sender's "mail box". In turn, the SE going to the mailbox, got definitive answers in short order (bless the time differences around the world!). In no time at all when each SE knew the "address" of a colleague's mailbox, communication amongst the troops began. In time, "chatting" took place when two SEs, who, having agreed to a set time to confab, would alternately post messages into each other's mailbox. Time and distance disappeared. Sound familiar?? This was 1972-73.

== Next, it was time to see what the real world was like, so I joined the team in Manhattan in the Media Branch Sales Office. I attended IBM Sales School at Princeton and entered the branch as the representative for the IBM 1800 system. Media customers (publishers, Madison Avenue advertising agencies, radio and TV media, etc.) had need for this unusual computer system in the manufacturing arena (CBS LPs), publishing arena (NY Times - editorial and communication, data-base researching, typesetting), distant communication (Time magazine), electrical power management (Readers Digest), subscriptions fullfilment, telephone management (Blue Cross), the quadri-ennial national elections communications and predictions and the newly emerging application of audio input/voice output .... Really challenging tasks.. I got to know the luncheon menus of almost all mid-Manhattan restaurants...that's how business was done then.
Because of the exposure I had had and my experiences in WTC, I was next invited to join a team of technical support personnel to be housed in Italy, in a new Sensor-Based Support Center , director, G. Montresor.
With my sons approaching high school graduation and future college, and their having twin aunts as surrogate parents, Elaine and I left for Milan.

== The three years I spent in Italy was a mixture of personal sorrow and professional challenge. My wife, Elaine, a long time diabetic, succumbed after a few months' residence. My sons chose to attend college in the Boston area (Curry College and Emerson College) rather than in Europe. I spent the time engaged in developing application demonstrations as the manager of the demo centre, making calls in the western countries, representing IBM at the European COMMON Group (user group). One application, in particular, raised some excitement - audio I/O. I had used our lab's delta-modulated, highly sampled speech digitalization process to have a digitized vocabulary prepared in several European languages using professional speakers' voices sampled and stored in three inflections. The vocabulary was such for the demo that the user could touch-tone in items by code number, quantities, etc. to an order entry function and hear back, in clear articulation and inflection, the order taken, its status, etc. -- in English, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. This was a computed response from the glossary! A battery driven, portable, acoustically coupled tone generator was used for input, since that technology hadn't yet appeared throughout Europe. This required incredible dealings with the many federal communications departments (PTT).. Talk about red tape !! But I needed this distraction. (Distraction = Originally I'm in Milano, Italy, for the start of development. The mainframe is in Montpelier, France, for implementation and testing. The demo with audience is in Valencia, Spain. Communication "quality" is multi-national..)
During this time I learned to speak passable Italian, and improved my Spanish and German. Another bad experience involved my sons, along with Luciano Pavarotti:- a TWA plane crash on landing in Milan in Dec. 1975. But again, as diversions, I attended La Scala (my box to apartment walk time was 20 minutes), the operas at Verona, and (in season) in Vienna and London.

Through the good offices of Elaine's aunt in Florida, I met, courted and married Ruth Marcus, recently widowed herself. Her son, David, was finishing high school and about to enter U of Florida, while her daughter, Michele, was getting her degree in Education at the Indiana U of Pennsylvania. Ruth and I spent one year in Italy to return to Lake Worth, and who knew what at IBM.

== In Boca Raton I joined the planning group preparing what became the IBM System/23 (Datamaster). My international background was useful in helping to specify and design, for the first time, a truly international computer system, with almost all specifications embodied in the one design. At that time EBCDIC was the character coding for IBM systems. This got changed to ASCII with extensions. I had many battles to fight to produce a multi-lingual character set, its displayable images, and the supporting keyboard and layout. (ISO standards in many cases were lacking.) To support this enlarged character set, we created the "Alt" shift key, to provide an alternate shift to the standard case shift. System/23 was a BASIC-based integrated desktop computer with the large 5 1/4" (true) floppy. [ click here for some background on vintage IBM computers -- from Mike Gallant, the IBM PC page, and the IBM 5150, so-called "original" IBM PC, and from Alexios Chouchoulas, yet another page on the IBM 5150; and from IBM Canada - vintage PC s] . So far advanced was its development that when Don Estridge and crew formed Project CHESS (don't assume a strong relationship) to produce a "personal computer" quickly, many of the Datamaster functions were adopted intact (for example, the use of Alt with the Numeric Pad to enter an ASCII character and the Ctrl-Alt-Shift interrupt). A major change was in adding two function keys to the 10 already present, and to move those keys to the top from the left side panel. Many meetings were held to agree to the layout providing three segments (for possible footprint adjustment) typewriter, cursors,etc., and numeric pad. Sometime in this interval, I attended the Hannover Fair, came across a young, bearded fellow hunched over his computer showing passers-by what a "user-friendly" interface could do. --Steve Wozniak. But who knew then??
System/23 was announced but with the PS/1 out so soon afterwards, the Datamaster quietly disappeared.

== A year as IBM Visiting Faculty to the Center for Minorities in Science and Engineering, at my alma mater, University of Maryland, in College Park, allowed Ruth and me fresh air in academe. It was invigorating to be among so many eager young people. Asked by students about to graduate into "the real world", I put together a series of talks and a book on Personal Financial Management aimed at graduates-to-be stepping into a (relative) world of "wealth". Those were memorable days. I look back fondly at that stay with Jim Newton, its director.

== Back at Boca Raton, my last assignment, and a culmination of years of working in education and the computer world, was in the Education Department, particularly in attempting to create a technical environment conducive to innovation. In fact, INNOVATION was the name of the technical site journal I edited. It was during this time that I was introduced to the internal IBM communication system, with its Virtual Machine structure that seemed reminiscent of the old SE Info System in WTC days and seems somewhat like today's world wide web of the internet. See my page entitled "Recollections" for some more recent remarks on those last months.

In retrospect, during my years at IBM, I worked on the development of or simply with a few computer systems: the IBM 704, the IBM 709, the IBM 7090, the IBM 1130, the IBM 1800(DACS), the IBM system 360, the IBM system 3, the IBM Datamaster (System/23), the IBM PS/1 (personal computer), the IBM 5155 Portable (i.e., luggable), and finally, the IBM PC (plain, XT, AT, and oops - Jr.). Some information is available on these at this list of sites and museums dedicated to the history of data processing and here as well. .. .. .. .

In retirement, Ruth and I continued to travel abroad (UK, Italy, and Spain), western United States and Canada as well as New England, Ontario and Quebec provinces, visit the children, now married and in distant places. We enjoyed playing contract bridge socially (Ruth was ardent in this), took up golf, held several theater subscriptions, and generally enjoyed southern Florida.

My Ruth, had had cancer while she and family were living in Pittsburgh. Some twenty years later it showed up again - this time in the lungs. Sadly, in 1995, she succumbed to this dreadful disease.

As this is written, I occupy my time with friends, correspondence, theater - going, the children and grandchildren, some volunteer work (SeniorNet), a long-standing almost-monthly gathering of BIGMACS (Boca International Gastronomic Marching and Chowder Society [wine tasting group of now - retired IBMers and friends]), and with the local PC Club at Poinciana,. I have renewed relationships with high school chums, many of whom have retired to these Florida counties and so have authored several webpages . ... still hacking away at golf .... recently resumed bowling (wished I could switch my bowling scores with my golf scores) .... begun serving on the THHS Chapter, the PC Computer Club, and The Royal Palm Performing Arts Theatre Boards of Directors, and, of course, browsing the Internet and learning, learning, learning.

I hope this synopsis hasn't bored the reader. My son, Andy, had been after me for ages to document my life. ...

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