Drilling an oil well and the ‘ole 702’
IT’S ALL ABOUT
Back in the day, in the mid 1950’s, Mr. Charles’ boss, the Chief Accountant of a major oil company called him into his office and said, “Charlie, on Monday you are to report to the Prudential Building to go to school. You can’t tell anybody where you’re going or what you’re doing, not even your secretary!” Mr. Charles, at that time, was the Division Head of Budgets and Reports for the entire oil company and agreed to report for class.
On Monday, when he checked into class, he found it was a programming session for a big IBM computer. His secretary was so darn curious and flat out nosy, that she called Mr. Charles’ wife to find out where he was since he hadn’t checked out with her! Maybe she was worried, but for sure, NOSY!
The class lasted three full weeks and he was trained to be able to set up a large computer system for the oil company. Upon his return to the office, he organized a small programming group of two other people (Dale and Howard) to help, interact with him, and set up a very small office, just big enough to hold three desks and three chairs. I think it was in a closet!!
Where do you start to program for “drilling an oil well”? “No kidding, where DO you start?” They had to list every function as to where you would start and where you ended like the paper records would show…and how it would work in the computer to replace the manual system that they were currently using. The guys drew a diagram for all the activities that would be involved. It covered all four walls of the entire office!
And now, where do you really start? He said, you had to do everything character by character for the procedure you were going to put into the program. A simple example would be: if you wanted to multiply a quantity by a dollar cost you had to figure out how many characters were required in the manual procedure and then convert it to programming language and to the system. OMG! That’s way too tedious for me!
In the meantime, Mr. Charles recommended the oil company enter into a lease for an IBM 702, the largest system that IBM made at that time. It had 11,000 (seven bytes) or characters of internal storage and everything that was to go into the system had to be packed into the 11,000 characters! Today an i-Phone (cell phone) storage is infinity as we store on “The Cloud”!
During this time, the insurance industry was ahead of the oil industry in computer capabilities. They had a large live computer system operating in Chicago with which Mr. Charles made a deal to bring his team up and test their programs. On their first trip each programmer took 3 programs in “punch card” format. Boy, those were the olden days, for sure. In fact, most of you probably never even heard of a “punch card”! Of the 9 programs, only 1 would even read into the computer, the other 8 failed! The one that loaded was a “verification of accuracy” and was written by Mr. Charles.
During the testing process, Mr. Charles had the first floor of the oil company’s headquarters remodeled and made ready to accept the physical IBM 702 that had been leased. A separate air conditioning system was required for the equipment so the floor had to be raised two feet allowing cold air to go through the equipment to maintain a constant cool temperature. The entire computer center to house the equipment (remember for 11,000 characters of memory storage) was a quarter of a downtown city block! That first system was composed of a main frame memory unit, control unit, 10 individual tape drives, punch card readers, printers and keyboard.
What do you think the employees of this huge oil company were thinking as they saw this remodel and renovation taking place right in their own building…for a computer? Naturally they all began to believe this computer was going to do each of their jobs and they would be without work! To help overcome the employee concerns, Mr. Charles built an area as an “observation deck” in one corner of the computer room. Additionally, one of the guys on the team wrote a program which allowed each employee a small part of participation. The employee would give them his birthdate and the computer would print a calendar page of the month he was born, high-lighting the day of his birth.
Even though this was done to waylay employee fears there was still much concern on many of the employees as to what the impact would be on the employee’s particular function. One of the members of Mr. Charles’ carpool, Doug, experienced a mental breakdown because he thought the computer would take over his job and he would be out of work!
After various testing, rewrites, revisions, trials and making changes which took about six months, the computer was running fairly smoothly. However, the team was always on call as other employees were constantly requiring help to straighten out their mistakes.
With everything running as well as could be expected, they ran out of capacity…in other words, they had more info than the IBM 702 could handle. What to do? The smartest way out was to install smaller systems in outside Division locations. Mr. Charles became the Coordinator of all computer activities from remote locations to the home-based unit. He was constantly shifting systems from location to location. The new IBM 30 was their basic unit, but they also had 40’s and 50’s. So, Mr. Charles would install a 30 then replace it with a 40 or 50, and shift the 30 to another location, while he was replacing another 40 with a 50 and shifting the 40 to another location. He said it was a giant checker game all over the United States and crazy to keep up with all the moves!
As he traveled, he carried an IBM portable…80 pound unit which was the size of a carry-on piece of luggage and actually looked like a big plastic suitcase with a heavy long plastic handle. The monitor was only about 6-8 inches square! Also, he always had a box of “floppy disks” which he could load into his heavy duty “lap-top” which contained information required. The portable unit held miscellaneous testing materials which would allow him to figure out what the next step would be when he was at a remote location.
From this experience and his incredible accounting and analytical mind, he decided during the late 1950’s that at some point in the future everyone in the US could benefit from having a little “IBM” within their home. He thought every “cook” would keep a little suitcase sized piece of equipment on their kitchen counter top to keep their recipes and other important pieces of information close at hand.
Back at the office, one day during lunch, he walked across the street to talk to the Banker at City National Bank. He asked the Banker for a loan of $50,000 to start a little company to make “PERSONAL” computers, as he thought everyone needed one in their homes. The Banker laughed him out of the office, saying “You need to go back to work, that’s crazy!” Mr. Charles said by the time he got back to his office, the banker had called his boss and told him what his crazy employee was trying to do! Imagine that….Mr. Charles was thinking about incredible future possibilities before Bill Gates was even walking!!
Knowing that his ideas were golden, Mr. Charles decided he had had enough training of other employees, making money for the huge oil company and decided to take early retirement to start his own bunch of companies! He began several ventures and provided services for all the oil companies around the US not to mention insurance companies, big box stores, and just about any other company that was using a large mainframe computer. Who knew better than the first man that installed a large-scale computer in an oil company in the US??
Today Mr. Charles, at almost 98 years of age, is still thinking about computers, various new inventions, follows the DOW, oil business, drilling rigs, fracking and provides accounting reports as needed. He continues to be amazed that what he did in the 1950’s with that first humongous 702 computer on a quarter of a city block, can now be achieved thousands of times over, much faster, with the capacity and power of the cell phones that we each carry in our hands!
Pretty incredible in my book. He’s still a sharp, one of a kind, smart cookie!