#Doug enters early
My first encounter with an actual computer was the day my daughter was born (and she was not the computer). I had decided to go back to school, finish my degrees, and become a professor. My first meeting with Father Doyle, chairman at Rockhurst College (which was near our house), was in the evening when my wife was still in the hospital.
Fr. Doyle talked to me a few minutes, learned a little of my story, said “You ought to be a math professor, quit worrying about how and just come over and start taking whatever classes you need rto get into graduate school”, and then in a casual way rook me to a nearby room and said “This is something called a computer we just got, I’m going over to the Jesuit residence for dinner, but if you really want to learn, there’s a manual on the rack explaining how to write machine language programs. You might want to try something, in case it catches on fire pull this switch, and I will be back in a couple of hours but you can stay”. It’s called "Introduction to Computers 101, and it worked for me
Enrollment at Rockhurst started soon after, and a year later with Father Doyle’s help I transferred to at the (fairly) nearby University of Kansas, and a few years after arrived at Marquette as “Herr Professor Doctor J. Douglas Harris” and started off writing programs in Fortran.
Living in Kansas City and beginning to transition from architectural helper to mathematics professor, and with a new daughter just arrived and family visiting from abroad, my wife needed a job quickly and ended up a keypunch operator at downtown Trans World Airlines. They found her to be an extremely reliable employee and offered her the chance to learn programming for free through an IBM facility nearby. Since they used exclusively Cobol that wouldbe the language. Such a career was not her goal, but I offered to do her homework (it was mostly an off-campus course) in order to get the experience, and that is how I learned to love Cobol as a language.
After accepting a position as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Marquette to start in Fall 1969 I needed summer employment, and Dr. Hanneken, who had just hired me, arranged for the Computer Center to hire me for the preceding summer to write statistics programs that the department might be able to use for instruction. My mentor for that job, Bill Weideman, was a very accomplished Fortran and assembly language program for the IBM machine which was the University Computer at the time, so I began learning that language (which I guess they did not realize I did not know). Bill was probably glad to have a somewhat kindred spirit in the department and carefully shepherded my efforts, which did produce programs that did run and were used.
In the next few years folks began to realize that real universities would need real computers, a view held mainly by some faculty in the engineering school, including Bobby Richardson who needed to do structural engineering problems, and Bob Lade, an extremely bright young professor who was then chair of the department of Electrical Engineering. The Business School was only slightly involved, since they had access to the IBM 360/30 (I believe) which was processing business records for the University. I got involved in the selection process mainly because of my friendship with and respect for the engineers, and desire that we would be able to start using computers somehow in math classes.
The selection process was my introduction to “the computer business”. IBM of course wanted to keep MU in their camp and offered the new and exciting “RAX” or “remote access”. Bob Lade and I soon learned that it was “Clumsy Remote Batch From a Terminal”, the clumsiness being that you had to kearn IBM “Job Control Language” to use it, something you did not need to just turn in punched cards at a desk (and receive your output next day). Honeywell tried to get in the door, and Burroughs especially pushed through the Marquette Board of Trustees for us to accept a wonderful new approach to computing that all the best universities were about to adopt - notice the qualifier on the timing. There was a little-noticed competitor Xerox attempting to sell us a “Sigma 9”, really a product of a company called SDS (Scientific Data Systems) that they had purchased and renamed “XDS” (you can guess the expansion of the acronym).
Two things developed. - The first was that the MU Board of Trustees insisted we consider the results of a very carefully prepared(by Burroughs?) set of questionaires each company had been required to fill out. There were three almost identical question sets, one for “Batch”, one for “Remote Batch”, and one for “Time Shared” (or some other similar term), as the three modes that might be used. All the vendors gave almost identical answers (in the case of Burroughs with an untried system it did not make sense to even answer them)
The first thing we learned is that Xerox came in very low, because they had done something almost unprecedented in the industry, they had told the truth! When they did not know they said so, and when the question did not make sense (many times) they delicately said so.
I got interested in the Xerox database capabilities and learned that their system, a so-called CODASYL DBTG style system, was a very fine implementation of a classical style system that would actually work well for the University in its own business processing, and offer us a chance to teach decent database courses!
From the engineering faculty perspective the Xerox Fortran compiler was very well tested and of high quality, and they had no need for any mode other than batch, so it was a win for them. Xerox won that battle and delivered a well-tested system that mostly worked. I love new things, but I do not love then when teaching depends upon them every day and that left Burroughs out completely. With IBM what we could do would depend upon what they wanted customers to be doing, and that would not even be near our control.
During that selection process, and later, I developed great respect and admiration for Roy O. Kallenberger, for many years Vice President for Business and Finance. He was a total gentleman whose word could be depended upon, wouldhelpif in any way possible, and did help immensely when we became the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science in 1979, with me as the new chair.
Some apparently saw it as a fault that Roy consisently kept the University “in the black” and so did not often “jump” in new directions. Since he coupled with great 1respect for the needs of the academic mission I just saw it as stability! At any rate the beginning of the “Xerox era” also was the beginning of Marquette’s journeys with computing, and the awakening of the Deprtmental influence on computing there.
I had become very much interested in a development called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Networking)