Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–78
used at Shell. It had magnetic core storage. I think it had maybe 10,000 words of storage not
2,000. It had magnetic tapes, all kinds of stuff. But it ran on binary-coded decimal language,
which is 10-percent less effective in storage than binary. So the first two computers I used were
not binary machines. It was only when I went to Yale that I had access to a machine—an IBM
709—that was much, much faster. All these machines were made with vacuum tubes, with all
the problems that such machines have. They were down a lot. But they were very informal with
the Burroughs 220 here. You went over and convinced the person who was sort of nominally in
charge of it that you weren’t going to break the machine, which took you about fifteen minutes,
and then they wrote your name on a piece of paper that was stuck with the only piece of Scotch
tape to the wall. If your name was on the list, you could come in. You could sign up for time
and come over and use it. It was sufficiently slow, by modern standards—though fast by the
standards of my day—that you would sit there and you could tell what part of the program was in
by the pattern of the lights on the screen.
So, I would sit over there and work on stuff and then watch it. It would print out
something. I would look to see what it had printed out and decide if I wanted to modify things to
try something else. More and more people were learning to program, but I don’t think Willy
programmed himself. He had a young woman named Barbara Zimmerman, who had started as a
draftsperson, doing drawings for him, and then she started learning about the computer and that
was very helpful to Willy because now he basically had his own computer person.
So that was sort of the life. You fixed a lot of things. There were no service contracts on
stuff. If the accelerator was broken, you went inside and tried to fix it. Depending on the level
of difficulty, a faculty member might or might not be there. Electronics—well, I’d had a lot of
experience at fixing electronics, but then so did some of the students. Some of the students were
really good. There was a guy named [Russell] Keith Bardin, who I thought was very good at
electronics. I think he had just gotten his PhD [1961] and ended up going to Columbia, and I
have no idea where he is now. I’ve lost track of many of these people, in the mists of time,
probably.
ASPATURIAN: You’d been here just a couple of years and then you were put on the tenure-track
faculty. How did that come about?
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