🚀 go-pugleaf

"John Richards" <JR@blackhole.invalid> wrote in
news:1%l1o.19847$0A5.9805@newsfe22.iad: 

> Luckily I had enough years (31, including military time), to qualify
> for an immediate pension under the old CSRS (rather than FERS)
> retirement plan. I had been a GS12 step 10 for quite some time, so at
> least the pension is sufficient to live on.  With a 'defined benefit'
> I don't have to worry about 401K plans declining in value.   :-)
> -- 
> John Richards
> 

Excellent.  Our yard closed before I could become vested in CSRS, so I 
extracted my money before some bureaucrat penned a reg and stole it from 
me.  I rolled it over into some investments that have a fair income 
coming in, though a retirement check from your rich Uncle would have 
been better.

I entered CNSYD as a WG-10 Electronics Mechanic and made WG-12 in the 
Shop 67 "Instrument Room" before taking a lateral to a GS-9 in the 
Metrology Lab, which was a good move as I made GS-11, top grade for the 
worker bees, in no time.

I rarely worked on a bench at Metrology.  I wrote a Dbase III data 
processing system on the new fangled IBM PCXT with a lot of 
enhancements, compiled with Clipper, the Dbase compiler, that brought 
local control of the MEASURE system from the mainframe at China Lake, 
CA, to the lab floor.  The MEASURE system at CNSYD was always a disaster 
because of all the interim calibrations of anything use on a nuke 
reactor, like torque wrenches that had to be cal'd every few hours 
during use, before and after use, and during the normal interval.  
MEASURE, the old batch processing from the 60's, was swamped with hand-
written cards that made the error rate 50%.  Navy had no idea what the 
yard's metrology status was.  In 2 months after my implementation...me 
and Gloria, my GS-3 clerk typist data entry clerk...we got the error 
rate down to .6%, then to 0% after I found that errant record on the 
cool dual 33MB (not GB) Tulin full-height hard drives.  After adding an 
NEC self-threading 9-track tape drive with a hacker's PC bus interface 
card and drivers, I wrote some Dbase code, compiled with Clipper of 
course so it didn't take all week to run, that streamed the exact data 
image the big mainframe at China Lake wanted to see, completely 
eliminating all the errors caused by keypunching it all in again from 
our carefully printed METER cards we were mailing them.  We went 
paperless!  The mainframe guys, though very curious, were convinced it 
would never work, but did cooperate enough to let me run a "test 
database" on the mainframe, loaded from my mail-it-to-them-monthly 9-
track tape.  They were astonished at the results, which isn't rocket 
science.

Some bigwigs from NAVSEA came down to steal it from me and put their 
names on it demanding I hand over the programs to them.  I readily gave 
it to them to take back to DC but got many angry phone calls when they 
discovered they had the COMPILED version of my software, not the source 
code they were only going to get over my dead, cold body!  My shipyard 
commander agreed and made a few angry phone calls of his own.  We never 
sent it to them.  Pearl Harbor had a DEC VAX, 8 keypunch operators, a 
systems analyst, a system operator in their local system.  My whole 
operation cost LESS then Pearl Harbor's PRINTER!  My printer printed the 
cards directly off the Z-fold at the touch of a button, one, more or all 
of them, at 600 cps, which pretty much trashed doing anything else on 
the 4.77 Mhz PCXT 8088 processor...(c;]  So, I put myself on graveyard 
shift doing all the database maintenance and daily printing and monthly 
tape making jobs in the early morning....when noone was around.  Best 
job I ever had after it was all running smoothly.....THEN THE YARD 
CLOSED...dammit.

Security Group dropped down on us from the political fallout of doing-
it-ourselves when we first went online.  "How do you secure this system 
when the shop is closed?", they demanded.  "We turn the damned thing off 
and lock the door on our way out!", I replied.  At that time, Navy 
computing was never just "shut off" because most of it wouldn't 
"restart" in a month if that happened.  The Security Group people tried 
and tried to hack into my XT past the hardware lock I had installed to 
keep the unionists from trashing it for a week but never succeeded.  
There was a little board I guess they didn't know about you plugged into 
the bus that had to give you permission to boot up.  It worked great.

When the system booted, being a Navy computer, a green (monochrome 
monitor) US flag came on the screen waving in the breeze and the little 
speaker played a passable rendition of the Star Spangled Banner every 
morning during the bootup procedure.  If some computer bureaucrats hell 
bent on destroying us were there, everyone in the shop stood at 
attention, hands over their heart during the National Anthem and chided 
our "guests" about why they were unpatriotic during our bootup.  The 
other little background bug running for them made all the letters on the 
screen gradually fall into a pile along the bottom of the screen if you 
didn't type on the keyboard within 5 minutes, horrifying mainframe 
visitors until someone clicked the spacebar which restored the screen.  
I found that on a BBS in Atlanta...cute.  Like I said, a great job for 
the time....

I still have the source code, a Clipper compiler, DBASE III's last 
update for DOS 3.3 and my compiled runtime module on a few 5.25" 
floppies in a drawer somewhere.  My boss thought I was a genius....not a 
bad thing at all!



-- 
iPhone 4 is to cellular technology what the Titanic is to cruise ships.

Larry