Episode: 2968
Title: HPR2968: Life and Times of a Geek part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2968/hpr2968.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:02:07

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This is HPR Episode 2968 for Wednesday, the 18th of December 2019. Today's show is
entitled The Life and Times of a Geek Part 3, and it's part of the series How I Found Linux.
It's hosted by Dave Morris and is about 41 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Part 3 of my personal story of experiences with computers.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
Hello everybody. This is Dave Morris. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. I started a series of shows back in 2014.
I was talking about my own personal experiences. I called it Life and Times of a Geek. Today I'm
trying to put together Episode 3 in this series. It's been a long process. I did one show in 2014 as I
said and won in 2015. There's been a long gap in between and it was partly because I wanted to
research the various things I was telling you about. I found that looking for them on the internet
was extremely difficult. A lot of the things that I wanted to talk about were not there. I think
it's largely because these devices or people or places or whatever events were happened before
the internet came into being and have never really been transcribed to it. One case I tried
was some laboratory equipment I thought might be of interest and I contacted the company which still
exists from 40 or 40 years ago, 45 years ago and asked them about it and they said that they had
kept no records because it was equipment that they couldn't sell now for safety reasons.
It's been a bit of a dispiriting process and it makes you feel very old as I say in the notes here.
But it's something I've grasped and tried to finish off in the recent past so this is the
result of that. So in Manchester around 1973 I was a student, a PhD student which is what I talked
about in my last episode. I'm going to talk a bit more about this and hopefully tell you some
things of interest to hackers along the way. So when I went to Manchester to work as a
PhD student I was mainly based in the animal house of the zoology department. This is in the
basement of a building on Kooplin Street. I just mentioned this in case you want to look at the map
of that area. Part of the sort of main old Victorian university area. This is not an ideal location.
Some of these buildings are quite old. They were connected by tunnels, utility tunnels which had
phone lines and heating pipes and these tunnels were filled with cockroaches and mice and various
other nasties. And they'd come into the animal's room and I'm going back or to keep these down.
During my life in second year there another animal has became available in the same sort of region
and it's been previously owned by the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
called U-Mist in those days. It's now been absorbed within Manchester University.
This became free and it was on the top floor of what I think was called the Rusco Building.
So many of these buildings have changed use and been demolished in some cases so I'm a little
bit hazy about where it was but it wasn't a huge distance away from where we were across Oxford
and in it there were multiple rooms for offices and laboratory spaces and animal housing
places for experimental operators so it's really a advantageous move and these were rooms that
could be holds down to clean being purpose built this. There's a fair amount of work moving across
and some of this involved my research apparatus. So I'll tell you a bit about that now. The thing
about working in a biology department, the biology department in those days was there was an
expectation you'd be able to build your own apparatus so there was a workshop in the department
some very skilled people who could build all manner of stuff but they were busy. They were catering
for staff and students through a moderate-sized department. I did have some equipment built for me
which I won't go into detail about but I also ended up making some of my. First of all,
I needed an arena in which my Barbary doves, experimental animals, would be placed and I could
observe their behavior. There was a wooden arena available from a previous piece of research
when I first started but it wasn't all that useful because in order to use it you had to stand
beside it, look through a one-way viewing window and the bird that was inside, this thing would
rustle, it could hear me breathing, it could hear me moving and hear the rustle of this thing,
of the window which was one-way mirror, two-way mirror type thing. So it wasn't brilliant.
So I ended up building my own arena and I used a metal angle thing with holes in it called
Dexian and put a reference to it in case you're interested. I did say in my footnote that I acquired
some of this from my last job because it was being thrown out so I've actually used it to build
a shelving system up in my attic. It's really useful stuff. So what I built was an arena where the
birds were placed which was a meter square and above it I built a four-sided pyramid for observation
and so I didn't want to actually be looking in there myself. There was a viewing window in it but
I didn't want to be looking in there while the bird was doing its thing. So I had access to a monochrome
video camera and that was mounted at the top of the pyramid. Much of my disappointment I couldn't
point the camera downwards because it just stopped working when I got tilted that way. No idea why.
So I had to set up a platform with it on in a 45 degree mirror. The camera recorded stuff onto
a real-to-real video record. So it's a sort of big half-inch tape device. Sure John Cobb would be
delighted to have access to such a thing and in order to analyse the behavioural stuff to grab
the data from I had to play the tape back to a little black and white monitor that I had in there
but working area. The arena was painted white and the camera was looking down into it and there
were fluorescent lights which shone onto the white surface but didn't get in the way of the camera
and so that was to give best visibility and on the floor of this arena I was actually made of
liner or something like that, plasticky sort of surface painted white. There were little feeding
stations placed randomly around the floor and in each one of these stations the bird would find
a meter to my grain. So I had a copy of the plan of the arena floor in a form that could be
duplicated so I could transcribe the movements of the bird and various other very information about
things that have been set up onto these once I was analysing the video tape. Now I say just as
an interruption here that one of the things I was trying to do while I was preparing this was to
find pictures of some of this stuff and just yesterday as I remember recording this I found
some slides that I'd taken of some of this equipment. At the moment I can't add them to the notes
because they're 35 millimeter colour slides so I don't have any means of turning them into
JPEGs or whatever but before this show goes live I plan to do the necessary scanning and prepare stuff.
So there are some pictures of some of the things I'm talking about. So another piece of experimental
apparatus I was using was called a Skinner Box. This is a chamber which is also called an operant
conditioning chamber. There's a link to Wikipedia info in which an animal is trained
performs some action in response to a stimulus and then you can use it with the trained animal to
produce behaviour of interest to whatever it is you're studying. So a Skinner Box is I think we
just had one I can't remember that but anyway it consisted of a small box which had metal panel
sides probably aluminium sheet or something and a transparent door which we could see through.
The wall opposite the door was fitted with a panel with perspex keys on it and there were two
and the bird was able to peck them or one of them and depending on how you wanted to operate things
this could this would operate a micro switch trigger a switch and then you could make it
deliver food to the bird because there was a place where a food hopper was set into the wall
and the bird could reach down and take food out of the hopper but the hopper could move
be raised and lowered so in the lowered position it couldn't feed when it was raised it could.
So you needed to train the bird to peck the switch and then we'd receive a wall.
The whole operand conditioning thing is quite long and complex I guess it's probably not that
end of interest to the HPR audience though I'll happily talk more about it if anybody's interested
but the birds most of them were able to learn this stuff quite effectively. Pigeons are not
I don't want to say they're stupid because they're not they're just not equipped with
behavior which is good for this type of thing. Their behavior is all about flying and finding
food from a height and you know they eat grains and seeds and stuff so they're not the brightest
and as clever as like cup crows and jackdaws and similar birds anyway it would do this and
so there was a light behind these perspex panels when the light came on the bird learned
that if it pecked the right color then it would get a reward. The box itself was made in the
department and it was you it was made by the workshop and they used a product called handy tube
which is I don't know whether it still exists though I did find a link to it. Square section steel
tubes with jointing pieces that are that are metal with a plastic outer layer you could hammer
them into the ends of the tubes and join them together and also configurations. You take them out
again too but not not easily and fall apart it held together really tight but it was really
good for making this type of equipment. I believe I have a photo of this in the slides. The Skinner
Box has its stud just was bunch of switches and lights and a motor to drive the feeding hopper.
So in order to make it do the things you wanted to say turn on a light, provide a reward when
certain behavior was detected. You needed something to program it. Now these days it'd be easy
you stick a raspberry pie on it and simplicity to do but in those days it wasn't anywhere near
as easy. We used programmable laboratory equipment which came from a company called Camden
Instruments Limit. This was the company that I mentioned I contacted and it consisted of a
series of metal units, boxes containing components which were to be clipped to metal rods
in a rack and they got their power through the metal rods through the clips. I don't have any
records of what power they needed but I do have a brochure PDF of a brochure from a later device
that the company made and it required 22 to 30 volts DC through the power rails through a
maximum of 50 milliamps. So it's not trivial maybe that's the source of danger that people were
worried about. We paid it no heed at the time but if you'd had wet hands and grabbed the positive
and negative you'd got a shock whether it would have killed you I don't know. You had a weak heart
maybe it would. Anyway the departmental workshop had constructed floor standing racks for these
units so that you could get several rows into it. I have pictures of some of this stuff which I'm
hoping to be able to include in the notes and it looks like a 19 inch rack actually so I think
they probably adapted a 19 inch rack at the end of the day. I don't remember that very well.
Anyway the boxes contained a variety of electronics. Many of them were logic gates such as a simple
and or and also inverters so you can make nands and norgates. The things like chart recorders and
counters and the whole principle of it was you put a bunch of these together like a sort of leg of
set almost and you could connect the output of one to the input of another with piece of wire.
We had made up specific bits of wire using very flexible copper, copper multicore wire which had
snap on connectors pressed stud type things on them which fitted onto the the face of the units.
You could do things like count the number of key presses or something like turn on the such and such
light or keep a record of which of the two keys in the scanner box had been pressed and you could
trigger the raising of the hopper. All of this could be done through this so it's like building
your own computer in some respects. The birds behavior I believe was recorded on a paper chart so
there was a sort of time base with ticks on it to show when it did thing and I remember configuring
this system to when the experiment was finished which was something like after the number of rewards
a number of key presses or something turning on a red light and I didn't actually stay in the room
with it, the room dedicated to this kit. I was down the corridor in my office and I'd run some
wires down the corridor and the light came on outside my office or in office I can't remember.
I also made a work to how to do I can't remember whether it was a flip flop or an oscillator of
some kind which I guess the two are fairly similar. I don't remember much about this now but the
oscillation of this thing would be triggered when the experiment was over and connected to it
was a little speaker so it would buzz, very low level buzz, series of clicks or something. So I
I could I could even be asleep in my office which I wasn't but and this thing would be going
b-b-b-b-b-b to say the thing was finished so I could go and change over to the next bird in the
sequence so and of course all my data was being collected automatically so I mentioned Camden
instruments and the fact that this sort of kit went out of favour because it was potentially
dangerous. I thought it was really cool I was learning about logic and boolean algebra and
stuff in the context of computers and having a sort of leg of set that let me do this was
pretty cool. So leaving aside the research I'm going to a lot of detail about what it
one white was and what we did with it and stuff because I don't think it's really likely to be
of interest here but I want to do other personal anecdotes as postgraduate student you ended up
being a demonstrator. A demonstrator is a term I think it's a British, Britishism for a more advanced
student who's helping out with teaching of undergraduate students so that was all about
assisting in lab sessions and we were paid for we were paid reasonably well it certainly seemed
a pretty fair wage so we were quite happy to do this we all we all ended up doing this you couldn't
you couldn't escape it if you wanted to but most people were very keen to you know the only
downside of it was that you had to prepare yourself quite well for the sessions because you're
going to be asked any sorts of questions and you didn't really want to be calling the main lecturer
to answer them because otherwise being paid for. So in America it's just the undergrads of being
taught stuff that wasn't necessarily something we learned ourselves as undergrad. I don't remember
all of the lab sessions we worked in over the years but I do remember a few remember doing
dissection lab for first year students so they were sort of classic dissect a frog,
dissect a rat and stuff. Remember that we also did initial classes for the medical students
at the school down the road and they were the ones who made the most appalling mess of
bits all over the place. I'm not sure if medical students are a special breed or what. We did
microscope labs. I remember them being quite detailed because what you're doing there is you're
looking at slides. The slides have been stained so you can identify the individual tissues or whatever
you're looking at and you need to find the relevant bit and make drawing of it so you understand it
but using a microscope had its difficulties. First of all to actually find the thing that you're
looking for given that you move in a slide around with your hands and it's magnified a lot and
so the tiniest movement translates to a huge movement in the view find as you're looking down
the microscope and so many people would go I can't say anything and they'd wind the microscope
down towards the slide to get it in focus for getting that it was quite capable of hitting the
slide and crunching it out which often did the microscope was robust enough to deal with that
the slides suffered. This was a fairly common thing we used to say to them if you need to do that
wind the lens down by looking at it not by looking through the eyepiece wind it down as low as
possible then look in the eyepiece and wind it up that way you can't crunch it don't ever wind it
down when you're looking through anyway but significantly large amounts I should say.
It was also involved in physiology labs this was where we were looking at animal physiology recently
killed frogs for example or cockroaches were quite popular where you monitored nerve impulses
with an oscilloscope you had to learn about using an oscilloscope and teach me how to do it
and also I seem to end up being the person who always caught the cockroaches was a tank full of these
anyway it's a technique statistics lab I was in I was involved in that lab because as a
biologist you need to do a statistical test on data then I was involved in helping up with that
and trying to explain what the statistical tests actually meant that was quite hard work
again my own head around what it meant and finally I was involved in some brain labs that my
supervisor ran where we went down to the medical school anatomy section and we had a sort of back
room there where we had each had a human brain to to cut up and examine and draw and whatever
identify all the pieces which was a little bit slightly harrowing probably the most harrowing
was going through the anatomy lab where there was rows and rows of of slabs with with the corpses
cadavers on them people kind of up but you can get used to all sorts of things yeah we had to learn
quite a lot about the structure of the human brain more rapidly than we had expected in order to
do this course justice that it's not a simple matter because brain tissue is just sort of I
suppose it's been preserved tends to be a sort of uniform gray jelly like material so spotting
where one one area ends the next begins it takes takes some experience and skill there were tons
of panic books I could say about events and stuff of course but I think it's it's probably going
way outside the the remit of HBR to do this so I'll stop at this point so obviously
since I ended up working in computers there was a you look gathered there was a fair amount of
access to computers I was doing this zoology one instance was using the computer graphics unit
which was a section of the the main IT part of the university so I had all these sheets of paper
with plans of my arena and I'd drawn animal tracks and stuff onto it from the video recordings
and I needed to turn these into coordinates for analysis the computer graphics unit could help me
and they had a pdp 11 computer which could be used for for the data capture and analysis I didn't
use that very much though but particularly the particular devices a device I would use was called
a a DMAC digitizer and made by a company called Dobby McKinney's of Glasgow then's the the DMAC
name now this is an incredibly difficult thing or has been incredibly difficult thing to find
much information about they were they were fairly common around at that time but very little
information has been preserved about them I found a stack exchange article that I've referenced
here and it shows some information and pointed some pictures of this thing but not necessarily when
I was using now basically it was a heavy glass topped box like table thing in my particular case it
was on some substantial legs where it could be tilted so it had a sort of pivot underneath it so
you could tilt it for freeze of use I think the top was maybe a meter square I don't remember maybe
I'm overestimating that it was glass topped and under the transparent top was a space where an
X and Y sensor moved about the principle of this was that you placed a mouse or puck wasn't
wouldn't have been referred to as a mouse puck would have been the name you on the table and as
it moved around it would be followed by the X and Y device underneath usually you would just move
this puck and then you'd press a button on it it was connected with a piece of wire to the
device itself you'd press a button on it and the X and Y would would search for it and find it
and would then output the coordinates that they found that the puck had and I think it had a
perspex window on it with a with crosshair so you could line things up quite precisely this was
used this particular device was used quite a lot in the map making industry I recall but
anyway there is some information in my list of links which might give you more information if
you're interested as this device normally operated it had an eight hole paper tape punch on
so it would just punch the X and Y numbers onto tape as you hit the button but you could
figure it to do also think you could configure it to produce output in a continuous way as well
sampling every so many sure distance or it was time-based I don't know I never used that
anyway I would put my sheets on the table one at a time use masking tape to hold them down
and then zero the whole thing to corner of the picture and then I could follow the track
of the bird producer paper tape and the track of the bird could be traced and I pressed the
output button each point visited and the end product would be a paper tape the graphics unit
stopped providing this service during the period I needed it I can't remember why maybe they had
a lot of pressure for the for the the equipment I can't remember but I found out through
contact that there was a a DMACC at the local hospital the Christie hospital which is not
very far from university and I was able to go and use that to finish off my data capture just as
a an aside really as I was working in the in an office in the animal house at in the Zoology
department I had a moderate sized office I didn't share with anybody else for some reason I can't
remember why the there was a research group next door who was studying fish vision and they had
bought a mini computer which was a data general nova which I've referenced in the links I think
it was a 1200 I think I'm got a picture in my slide which I hope hopefully will include but
it they were going to use it to run experiments in the next door lab but it was initially set up
in the office I was using and they said if you want to use it go right ahead the machine was a
16-bit basis quite a large moderate sized thing in a 19 inch rack the the the memory of it was
fairite core which gives you some idea of its vintage I don't know how much memory there was maybe
16 or 32k don't know it did have paper tape reading capabilities and a punch I'm pretty
certainly had a teletype otherwise how on earth would you do anything with it how would you print
anything I don't have pictures of it unfortunately I remember there being a four-tran compiler in the
form of paper tape which I remember experimenting with it so to start the machine you powered it up
of course then you had to enter a bootloader by hand using the switches on the front panel then
when you then having tugged that in put that in for the switches I can't remember how many steps
10 or 12 maybe maybe less I don't know then when you set that to run then it you could make it
load a loader program from paper tape and then that loader could be used to load the compiler
organ there was no operating system on this one anyway and so it's just a case of loading this
to load that to load that and so you would develop a program which would run on the the sole
thing running a bit like sort of our do we know each type of things I guess you'd say these
just mentioned that for interest I used the facilities the University of Manchester regional
computer centers I talked about in my last episode and in particular I mentioned the ICL 1906A
and I found there was a room of terminals terminals in the glass box monitor the monitor with
keyboard type thing but there's also a lot of ASR33 teletypes and these connected to various of
the computing facilities the teletypes were connected to the 1906A and the operating system
called George which I mentioned before and I was able to access it and use it using the teletypes I
think there might have been 12 or 15 of them in the room it was a big room used first for teaching
so I had a lot of equipment in it but these were generally available to computer users used a
an interactive part of the operating system called MOP or multiple online programming so it's
possible to prepare work on the ICL using this mop and then to submit it as a batch job to
the big CDC 7600 and the version of George that they were using at UMRCC had been modified to allow
this so they they had hacked on this I'm going to talk more about George 3 and later
ended up using it quite a lot George 3 or George 4 and I just noted here that it's possible to run
an emulation of George 3 on the Raspberry Pi have not done it I'm not sure I will but maybe
be worth it just to see some get some sort of idea of how how it works what what it does so there's
another computer I used at UMRCC but just doesn't it has been an exploration of what it could do
this was the cyber 72 another CDC compute my memory of this machine is pretty hazy now
might have been a cyber 76 perhaps the 72 was replaced by 76 at some point I can't remember I remember
vaguely recall cyber 72 and 76 maybe they had them both this was a big setup a lot of money had
gone into anyway this machine had terminals with with quality screened monitors and good
keyboards unlike the teletypes and in particular it offered programming language called APL
which means a programming language and it's a it's a strange symbolic sort of language where you
can write quite complex mathematical expressions it didn't it doesn't handle all of the or didn't
handle all of the symbols that were defined for APL but there were compromises make that work and
I tried using it to do some simple statistics and found that you could try a really really small
program to do some quite powerful thing never really took it any further it didn't seem entirely
appropriate just mentioned that money was an issue being a postgraduate I had started my first
year and paid for my first year myself with money saved from a year out working during that
which I mentioned the last episode I did manage to get some grant funding for one or two years
but this wasn't really enough I managed to get a part-time job within the zoologist department
as a laboratory technician so that helped with the funding as a lab tech I was involved in
setting up laboratory sessions but mostly I was the the departmental driver so I'd ferry students
around from time to time pick people up from the station buy or collect things for the department
and I had to go a ferry it matches this fairly big city by UK standards so I got to learn my way
around a fair bit of it and I just wanted to mention a few events that I recall being a driver
one was taking a fellow post-grad student to who couldn't drive and she wanted to collect fresh
water muscles in a stream we just tapped to be right next to the joggeral bank radio telescope
so I couldn't put a picture of that here just for all time sake somebody else I took to collect
shellfish that landed no bay in north Wales that's a little bit further away from Manchester
but it's an interesting day trip as I recall I don't think I've ever been back there since
into north Wales but I had to go and collect maggots on a regular basis and local fishing
supply shops I'd come back with boxfuls of maggots or arriving I can't remember who who used
that and the one I think it was just the one so maybe a couple of times I was asked to go and
collect dead girls around one of the reservoirs in central Manchester I think it was
ordinary reservoir somebody was researching parasites in these girls I came back with a van
with I don't know half a dozen ten dead girls in the back and as I was driving along one that
was apparently dead and picked up and put in them thing suddenly woke up and started flapping
around in the back it didn't last much longer it was really sick I remember going to catch helped
catch fish in lakes in the possibly in the peak district in Derbyshire somewhere nearby
we were catching perch which were being used by the group that were doing studying on fish vision
and I also remember being asked to go to a local abattoir where an arrangement would have been made
for me to pick up something like a couple of buckets full of cows blood again one of the parasitologists
was maybe it's for a lab session or something like that yeah abattoirs are not my favorite places
well I had a few hobbies while I was a student of Manchester one in particular was I was trying to
learn a bit about electronics in particular I wanted to own a calculator and I'd seen the
Sinclair scientific in the newspaper adverts and it was a kit that you could build yourself
needed a bit of soldering of course I learned to solder at school but in a very basic way using
what I found out is called a tinsmith's soldering iron it's a big chunk of copper or a torpedo
shape on a handle that can be heated in a gas flame then you just use that to melt solder and we
were building stuff out of tin plate which is steel I think steel with a layer tin over the top
you could make joints with solder also when I was younger I'd done some soldering at home using
my dad's electric soldering iron quite a primitive thing as I recall but it did the job but
around this time in Manchester I bought myself an electric soldering iron an antex one 25 watts
relatively small tip and I also bought some other equipment to to help helps things out
particularly little aluminum heat sink that you can clip onto whatever you're soldering which
prevents the heat being transferred onto sensitive things which was quite important with this
Sinclair scientific which is pretty small there's a picture of it in the notes cost £9.95
in a kit form seems to ridiculous this small amount these days anyway I got it built one small
mishap where some internal bit got melted a little bit just a little bit not enough to damage it
but with the device it was a bit of a disappointment to be honest it used reverse polish to enter
calculations so you used instead of doing two plus three you put in two enter three enter plus
and then it was adding it together that that's not unusual you find that in other contexts
in programming languages and that type of thing and other more advanced calculators back it didn't
have a decimal point calculator you had to put it in an exponential notation in order to
and when you did things like multiplication then and division you'd find that the device was
actually doing repeated additions it was quite clever in the sense that fair bit had been squeezed
that really tiny little device but it was it was no it was a bit disappointing that it would take
a long time particularly if you tried to run functions like log or anti log or sign and cosine
and stuff like that these are all iterative as well so the calculator was extremely slow when
you wanted to do anything typed stuff in and then set it back and wait for it to come back with
the nuns still it was an interesting voyage I'm still quite pleased that I tried it even though
my £9.95 didn't get me a huge lot there's I put a lot quite a lot of information about this in
the links so if you're interested you can go and have some of the background of this device so the
last thing I want to say is that towards the end of this process which should take it four years
working on this PhD some of which come out of my pocket some had come from a grant after doing this
for four years then I was strongly wondering whether I was doing was getting me any I realized
that the research topic that I was following was not really going to go anywhere very
and yeah I also realized that I'm not much of a researcher I don't have that necessarily the
patience I can think now 45 years on of ways I could have solved some of those problems but at the
time I was not mature enough or able to think clearly enough to make much of it my experimental
animal was not ideal pigeons are great now but they're not all that bright we were asking them to
differentiate between different values of food quantities and that type of thing and I think to
a lot of in a lot of the environment that doves and pigeons live that's not really a big consideration
and they they don't operate as individuals as much as in flocks you see a flock pigeons landing
on a field to to go through looking for seeds and that's a competitive element and we didn't
pay much attention to anyway that's outside the the subject that we're really dealing with here
I had learned stuff about electronics quite a lot of biology by doing the demonstrations and
that sort of stuff that's also interested in how Jim was researching reading about the subject
quite a lot and I also picked up a fair bit of computer science just by being involved with
the computers that were available so I thought that rather than struggling to finish this PhD
I might be best to leave the about to get a job preferably in IT and possibly finish off the
PhD away from the away from Manchester for that never came to be but I did get a job in IT and
moved away and I'll tell you more about this in the next episode which I hope won't be in
another five years or whatever it was so that's it hope you found that interesting at least in part
okay then bye bye
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