7 The UC Campuses

7.1 UC Campuses

I sort of niched around the edge of becoming a Caltech student. I actually applied a couple of different times and competitively applied to Stanford, and then I went down there and __ the place and here I’d been applying to UCR at their experiment station. It was all co-educational. I was also applying to Cal Poly at the state place that used to be only men but they had just changed to include women. So I __ Caltech and there were no women to be seen.

Then I said well, I will go dig out the ecology manuals and look at those. They didn’t __ to them, but they were buried in the text way down under everything, under permanent storage in boxes down in the basement. You couldn’t even get at them.

7.1.1 UC Riverside: Desert Ecology

1: UCR 1960 (2 pcs)

2: Carmen’s tale (ask her about Hilary/Gordon)

4: ecology

9. UC Riverside riverside.1-7

    Getting There        riverside.1
   
    Work in Physical Chemistry        riverside.1
   
    Mathematics and Ecology        riverside.2
   
    The Ewing Effect        riverside.5

Getting There

At that time I had already applied to UC Riverside. UCR was an interesting place because at that time they were encouraging students straight across from Caltech to use Riverside, in either direction. Caltech to UC Riverside, Riverside to Caltech. What had happened is a whole group of faculty that were interested in teaching had moved there from Caltech to see how much of a Pomona-type situation you could build within the university system. A regular small school, like a Pomona college, or a Claremont Men’s College, right near. Small liberal arts college.

I had pre-applied. They had an active group of people that were interested in ecology, a real good math department. Of course they had a real good chemistry; that’s where I went to work. I earned my living working in physical chemistry. The head of the department, head of the math and physics and chemistry. His name won’t pop in my head, bizarre, right now. But it will come later on.

*This was in the late 60s?

Work in Physical Chemistry

The lab asked me to train of what they call lathe work and ___ spline where you do ___ where you work onto a rack in place in hand. Usually they call it lab work when you specialize in that area, lathe work where you work on a big lathe. ___ for most of the stuff and turning things in synchrony with stuff, things like that. I never learned any of that type of thing at all.

When I went out to Riverside I had the money to get myself through one year left over from JPL. I essentially, I saved on each work ___ get myself out there through one year.

I took a course in chemistry from the head of the math, physics, chemistry department, Conway Pierce. Conway Pierce was the head of the mathematics and physics and the chemistry department. He himself was a physical chemist.

Physical chemistry is the reason I had the one invention that I had gotten and had with Xerox. __ for a hydrogen based regenerative fuel valve. I never followed up further on it but what I __ done doing the proof that the fuel valve would satisfy the efficiency of a __ cycle. Am I saying it right? ___ cycle, I think is the one that is the most efficient that you can have, things like . What I had done is a lot of math that was totally strange to him. He passed it on to a person the department whose specialty of mathematics, and derivation of ___ in physical chemistry. He said, “Conway, the stuff is right. I don’t see any problem with the mathematical derivation with the hydrogen fuel, regenerated fuel valve he’s created. But I’ve never seen anything derived like that in my entire life. Everything’s done on first principles, and not a single piece of ___ one step up from first principle. I didn’t even know you could do it that way. But looking at the derivation I don’t see any problems with it.” He got back to me, it was during the first quarter I was at UC-Riverside.

Mathematics and Ecology

I tried to do ___ mathematics and the other was ecology. I already had taken one course in the math department at the beginning of the calculus course, the ___ calculus course, three-quarters __ calculus. I found having it from first ___ person was really difficult. What I did was to take a double major. One is in pre-med zoology, zo meaning; the other was in theoretical mathematics. Theoretical because I couldn’t deal with applied stuff with any skill. It basic theory or set theory or it was a course . It better be taught by somebody whose orientation was theoretical rather than applied, because I never was very good at cranking numbers out. The reason theory underneath and so life went.

I went to UC-Riverside for 5 years because I worked an extra year, a ___ year as a double major in classical zoo and theoretical math. The last work I did there was, would have been 65.

So what I had done is through both my major and geology, but no ecology courses. The one, the only ecology courses that people were teaching. They would let me teach __ but they wouldn’t let me take for credit. ___ coming there as a student. Some of the other people like Mayhew. I had his field course, it was great. __ course in field botany was terribly good. There were people like that at that school that were wonderful.

The whole group that had come over from Caltech with the idea of teaching at a place that would just be, say the equivalent of a private college. And then, later on they were made a general college, they had to pull in ___ teaching and things like that. The whole thing was turned upside down, namely by the accountants in ___ coming up there, looking at the amount of cost per student. The accountants said there’s no way ___ money going to spend, the money . Zero, stamped, done. Some of the best teachers—in a great fit of anger, their whole job description effectively changed on them —left for other campuses, or just went right out into industry and that was it. So that was that end of the period that was places like Caltech or places, pregnant places like Pomona College, I would say. Something like Pomona College. And it came to an end. So things go in life.

*That’s right. Everything has its time.

In the midst of all of this, I had to __ partly support myself, by scholarship, partly by just earning bucks by doing . Part of the work I did was in programming for people like a the guy that was in population ecology. Can’t think of his name. Prout, Prout, yeah, Prout OK.

Prout was in population ecology. The problem with population ecology, the first thing that they did was assume panmixia. Panmixia essentially assumes an infinite size population with an infinite ___. So now guess what you can do at that point? All sorts of very simple algebra solutions that are graphic, things from population ecology. The panmixia type assumption was done right off the top of an infinite population with an infinite rate of stirring it up population. Not very real when I went out in the real world and tried to get some measures on what seemed to be going on in the real world.

I did so I programmed graphics programming, the ___ triangle coordinate systems, triangle coordinate systems. It was kind of neat to use that kind of coordinate system because on two, your variables are ___ when of the 3, by the time it’s ___ the third one becomes. It lets you show in a very symmetric, neat way the path that the populations are going to follow. That was part of the way I earned money, was doing programming for people like that. I set up a whole FORTRAN based system that analyzes data. It turned out that he had problems with his data that they never caught. ___ done some miscalculations on their computer. I say ___ so there were some people like Prout that were unhappy with ___ They brought me down from earning A’s in their course to getting B’s. I had to be careful about how many places I did that because I also had to stay on the scholarship because I couldn’t afford my education otherwise. Where other people were absolutely delighted with the stuff like Cardinal and Mayhew, and Dos over in botany.

I did some samples. The first samples that were ever done at , sampling the things from the point of view of an ecological related system across all the plant, animal. It is related ecological test. Desert ecology was always an area that appealed to me anyway, so I did, especially I was very concerned that the population was going so ___ sampling their usual convention, kind of like ___ hundreds or even thousands of items that you’re collecting series for insects, say. There was no way that I could do those kind of series on that ___ screwing up the ecology You get interested, might be ecology. You’re worried about ecology but you ___ worried about the consequences of the way you played the thing out. You just couldn’t take a ___ size sample because you just might be screwing up the world too much, both ___ in terms of people’s use of it later on. So those were some of the first samples that were ever taken with It was kind of neat because that was when the university first got given it. It was the first ___ sampling from a biological point of view.

There were just one or two people that had sort of wanted to ___ the place for Carpland and a couple of other people that were interested in limnology, looking at the ___ like the One moment you have water rushing down to the point where it was polishing the walls of the canyon, 30 or 40 feet up the side, and then you could go ten years with no rain at all. Or occasional thunderstorms on the could create some new problems but not the big flood. It was just all over that type of variability. Guess what? ___ again, look like the fellow, what’s the guy’s name, and now it won’t come.

*Oh, are you talking about Feller?

Feller, yeah, looked like the coin flipping experiment of Feller’s. It was just as bizarre looking. The system had its ups and downs.

I took a ___ entomology course which I did reasonably well in. They reportedly turned in all the stuff that I had gotten all over the state including all the ___ stuff into a ___ collection with ___ by—I can’t think of his name, but he was the senior professor, a full professor in the department, a full professor in the department. It was pointed out to me that all the stuff from ___ that was keyed to the Lars-Carpland’s work. My work had special colored labels and had ___ so it looked totally different.

He obviously promised me that that stuff would be passed back to me. Almost a year later I was walking by one time, and here was all the stuff in the trash. They had to do another downsizing, and ___ all the stuff that I had given to the entomologist there—a full professor in entomology, I can’t think of his name, I took the course from. Man that made me unhappy. It was really original work and it was work that Carpland and I were going to publish. And here he just ___ out of it.

For years I carried around the other samples. Finally Hillary after we got divorced, I threw it away because __ we would never do anything with them. You just threw the last of the ___ into the trash too. In the trash, in stages. So much for things like that.

___ at that point, I saw the ___ all over the universities . At that point in time both Lars Carpland and Mayhew were out to the of not being accepted into the next ___ to Assistant Professor. I mean from Assistant to Associate Professor, and getting that ___ tenure type. Especially now that we’ve made the switch from a school that was like Caltech, just a general campus, but with all the other stuff that goes in the requirements for moving toward a bachelors degree and so forth. They got cut out in that transition This came from when getting tossed out.

I told him that I could pick a problem that would be interesting say in physical I could pretty much nail the math and pretty much nail the I could go to the show and pull , I needed to do the experiments. I could do the mathematics on my little calculator tape, and If I totally screwed up, I didn’t want to be thrown out. On the other hand, this ecology was so open and ___ they were so much tied into things like weather patterns, behavior patterns, __ long-term cycles. ___ and all the students working all busily on stuff. Maybe they could make it a little more sociable, a little more roomier, so they did. And I never had any regrets.

At that point I was by myself and I needed to get the rest of my degrees in place. Riverside at that time had no general science degree that you could get. They required a heavy duty language and it took at least two heavy advanced courses in say Russian or some quote unquote easy language like German. Would they ever factor what was required in terms of coursework? The unfortunate thing, this happened to land right smack on my language problems that always ___ anyway. I probably would have gotten through that just fine, even a year later, when they opened general science major, instead of having to major in social sciences and stuff.

By that time I had moved on to Riverside to ___ but guess ___ double major in classical zoo just like pre-med, the standard pre-med zoo, zoologists, zoology. The other piece was theoretical math. My whole orientation then for my double major sat on theory.

I took just one course of applied math. I got an A in it. Did I ever have to struggle for that A. You can’t believe how hard I had to work for that A and I just said no way, I’m a theory, not an applied person. So I swapped. I had set theory and logic, things like that. When I took things like linear transformation, I took it from a person who taught from a theoretical point of view. I’ll probably do the proof and he laid the thing out and then ___ theory.

___ applied engineers ___ happy with that mathematician because they are all applied. Tell me where to put the number in, tell me how to crank, tell me how to pop something out the other end . Which piece of the machine you should be sitting at for . Which piece you ___ down to that kind of detail for the applied stuff. That was not my thing either.

That’s what I wanted to say because that was so influencing my life through its entire extent in everything I did.

The Ewing Effect

*There was something else that I learned about from Ken Lindahl when he was in high school he told me about this thing called the Ewing effect, making ice out in the desert.

The Ewing effect. Well it’s interesting that that process has gotten a name called the Ewing effect at this point in time. Ridiculous. I was curious about what would happen, I guess everybody thinks about what would happen. I was growing up during some of the worst of the Cold War. A couple of times in the 50s it seemed like we were only one small ___ from atomic Armageddon. There was always this problem: if it did happen, how would you survive?

I used to spend lots of time in the desert camping and things like that. __ was out there one thing went bad and sour, how would I do things? What could I eat, and especially how can I get water? The desert usually tends to be very, very short on water. I thought I bet you I could perhaps condense water down. By that time plastic film was available—I’m not sure what kind but I think this should have been in the 50s so maybe just plain polyethylene clear sheets were available then. Certainly that’s what I would have preferred I think if I had any choice in the matter.

I went out there on a cold clear night when there was still, still air. I mushed up a bunch of arcada. I also experimented with mushing up some devil cactus, but I felt really terrible about this. I’ve always had this funny deep ecology in my life. There was no way that I could spend a summer doing experiments on something like that, but I did just a little bit. What I’d do is to mush up a little bit, very mushy packets to put under the thing. Couldn’t use the thing that condensed the water. I ran it down __ with a gutter where I caught it also onto the plastic and ran it around into the plastic in a bottle as a reservoir. It was buried so gravity helped all the way. These were basic survival that uses some very simple things like plastic tarp, mushed plants, and __ dah dah.

I found that that worked surprisingly well. Then I decided ___ arcada is just everywhere that I’m at, and I ___ it up. I will ___ some of that, pound it up, because it’s incredibly tough material. It was a plant designed to ___ just about any animal and insect in the entire universe in the desert type of world. Then I’d eat it. It had probably one of the noxious compounds of the plant ___ that have ever been devised. ___ a bunch of that and tried the same trick and it worked beautifully. I found that the water didn’t taste anything like the stuff ___ so I wasn’t . I was getting a it wasn’t toxic which was neat.

I kept moving along and I wondered, is there any way I can get things ? I decided to pour water into a thermos. A good thermos, not a pretend thermos, but one that has real packing in it. One that has mirrored surfaces, with a wide mouth. I’d been collecting all this water the other way so actually I didn’t use one other thing for the experiment. My water would be fresh even from something that’s poured veracada I dug this hole in the ground, poured an inch of water. Weirdly enough I think I even used this old water because every water ___ drink and everything like that. I did it on a real quiet night and I I aimed it out to outer space. Outer space is what, about 40 degrees absolute, 40 degrees above absolute zero. This was a cold Mind-boggling enough when I went by it _ I had a block of ice in the bottom of that thing, a block of ice. So now I found a way to go from _arcada to drinking water to ice. How do you like that? So that was the Ewing effect.

*And how did other people find out about it? This high school teacher knew about it.

I used to show them things like that when I would teach the desert ecology course. I used to participate in the other courses that other people were teaching because I ___ a lot of the students. Camp ___ stories would take off at night. Or even girls, those were even co-educational. Old Mayhew or Vasic or ___ all the girls go south and all of the boys go north. Here’s how you do this ___ shuffle, don’t leave any mess. We learned such practical things as that, out into the desert. Of course that was a kind ___ for telling neat stories at night. That’s where ___. That’s how it got passed on. People actually tried some of that stuff and it actually worked, it was amazing.

*The ice in the desert, that was when you were at Riverside, right? Or was that?

Prior.

*Cuz you said Mayhew and all that.

Yeah, it was when I was very first at Riverside, I was passing that sort of stuff on. It was sort of an ongoing experiment which had been evolved over a few years anyway. By the time I tried it on their courses and stuff at, I actually had it to the point where the stuff worked ___ called it the Ewing Effect. Crazy. I didn’t realize. I had taken several cuts at trying to make ___ and found out that it was indeed possible.

The only thing you couldn’t do is sometimes you get this ___ come up ___ and goes skipping along.

The temperatures try to equalize themselves in the desert. Sometimes that funny little crepuscular time wind died down and then all these things worked beautifully. But sometimes it just stays at this low level and then you can’t get them to work right. It needs a completely dead still night to work right if you’re trying the freezing trick. Really all of them depend on a clear night, not overcast.

7.1.2 UC Irvine: Mathematical Ecology

    4: Feller’s coin flip, mentor killed

    5: biology dept, CS, PhD

10. UC Irvine riverside.7-21

    Undergraduate Degree        riverside.7
    
    Doctorate Program        riverside.11
    
    Random Numbers        riverside.13
    
    Whitaker        riverside.14
    
    Miscellaneous        riverside.19
    
    UC Irvine Commencement        1-4

7.1.2.1 Undergraduate Degree

In 65 I worked for Conway Pierce where he was beginning to design the first building going on at UC-Irvine where the Irvine campus was setting up. He saw that the original design of the building had been done by an architect that had zero information about what the sciences needed, whether it be biological sciences or physical sciences or anything. They had been designed for the mainstream. They brought in the architect who had designed fancy places over in LA. He ___ a little bit to make it a little more science friendly in both the direction of life sciences and physical sciences. He was interacting with that school ___ you see Irvine as well.

So I had actually gone along. My first year I took field courses from the top field people there at UC-Riverside. I also took math courses in theory. I also took some chemistry courses from Conway Pierce and other people in the department. I took some geology and other things because it supposedly ___ be an ecologist crossed everything.

Notice I’m not listing any kind of programming because programming courses didn’t exist at that time. Zero, none, zip. When I ended there there just were a few schools with programming. When I visited Knuth at Stanford, here I was learning you know a bunch of ramshackle ___ the real ___ real people. There was Knuth teaching ___. The rest of the society seemed to be hoping it would go away. And especially the math departments, you know, where they would hope it would go away.

Those are other twists and turns of life. I moved on to Irvine. The fellow that was at Rand Corporation was building the first of the Internet. He was doing all of the original research on Internet under NASA, ARPA—at that time, it wasn’t DARPA, it was just plain ARPA, Advanced Research Project. He started off at Rand Corporation being one of the gold boys. ___ Rand Corporation to ___ Irvine’s computer science department. Man, that guy was the most sophisticated computer scientist I have ever known in my entire life, and I’ve met some good ones.

__ he suggested that it made a lot of sense with the stuff I was working on, I should not just try to program directly in FORTRAN, but I should go to a ___ language that the military used to keep track of inventory. It was called Simscript, so he moved me into Simscript which sat on top of FORTRAN just like Simula. It was a simulation of language, high level simulation ___ all the structure in it that knew that the new language used like a language. I went back and worked with Simula and Simscript. One sat on top of ___ sat on FORTRAN. They were the first high level languages which would sort of do everything. So my entire Ph.D. thesis was actually written in Simscript and then later in Simula.

That was one reason why I didn’t have to type with many of the problems ___ and things like that. They were underneath the language, yet it let you work beautifully with things like sets, cues, and all that neat stuff. I worked as the pre to FORTRAN and then later on I ended up working over with Simula as well because it ___. That’s where all the original stuff I did in population ecology was done in those two languages.

There was another person that I used to call from Berkeley. I met him there at Berkeley as a person that was a general troublemaker and they weren’t . His specialty was working with different various in entomology and things, in areas of biology that looked at physiology and stuff. Physiology. I guess he was sort of a physiologist in a way, with cross discipline, physiologist. I can’t remember his name either. I just have repressed it. Several years into my work there in the department, one of the programmer women there said, “I want to move ___ I’m afraid that my husband is going to shoot me.” He said ___. He went over to help her move things out of her apartment. Her husband, as she was leaving, threw a fit, and shot them both dead. That was the end of my career in computer science and it was the end of my career.

It was funny, you see. I actually was in the first graduating class ever at Irvine. I did that by doubling up on coursework. To do that, I took a whole group of courses by challenging them. They had the courses set up so you could take them by a verbal challenge. A bunch of experts would come in, at least two, sometimes three, three by the time you were done, and interview your expertise in the . If you were able to convince them beyond any doubt that you had the necessary skill, they would test you on the subject. I took about half of my courses and about half by challenging them. My score was the highest grade point average.

I challenged most of my courses. I went out the other end with the highest grade point average at that time of any student they had there. I also applied to NIH for support. That was done in one year. It was ___ neat place. It was an interesting time. The school had set itself up at that time with a person that was basically a very ecologically oriented type of person. That was working ___ student, I think in some branch of physiology. He __ was the key person that was there in the life sciences. And with the computer science, the golden boy that did all of the original work on the Internet and other things like that, and also directed me to the languages I just described to you. That was the most gifted computer science person I had ever met from Rand.

*What was his name? Do you remember?

[Bernard R. Gelbaum, Chair, Math;Robert M. Saunders, Dean, Engr; Abraham I. Melden, Philosophy]

I can’t remember. I can’t remember either one, but I do know that ___ that my name and his name and a few key people like, there were only a dozen people on the first graduating course at Irvine. About a dozen, and I was one of them.

You would need to look at the person who was head of the overall biology department at that time. ___ the computer science ___ at that time too. I’ve never gone back and done it because I feel there’s too much pain, way too much pain. He was the second really ___ person my entire life that I had known to __ totally freak answer ___ life. So life goes and goes and goes. So life goes and goes and goes. Twists and turns and surprises, a little hard to plan far into the future. I’ve gotten very, it’s not that I ___ I very much like fractals as far as math is concerned, chaos ___ experimental science, it’s been ___.

*So you did graduate from UC-Riverside? UC-Irvine?

Yeah, as an undergraduate degree. I never did graduate from Riverside. It was only a year after I had left that they put in a general science major. I just could never make it through the heavy duty humanities that was required before they put that in place. Even though I had, obviously, units up the gazitch. And mostly good grades, not all, but most of them. I think my graduation, undergraduate graduation must have been in 65. [25 June 1966] At that point I was just a general biology major. Not ecology, not anything. Not a computer scientist, not anything, just biology. [The only one: 3 art, 2 english, 3 math, 1 psychology.]

At that point Irvine was trying to grow a ___ branch of the University of California. It was very small and very ___ at that time They were having some real hard times attracting faculty members and attracting the necessary resources for building. They sort of had a double zap, they had a terrible time justifying building new buildings. They also had a hard time attracting top people, but there were always exceptions. There were always some wonderful people that went there because they liked the atmosphere. Yet there were other people that were so incompetent that it just blew my mind, that also ended up coming there too. People went into psychobiology, put all area together to study brain function, things like that. working with cats and things like that. __ with some truly gifted. The guy that went into chemistry was a guy that talks about the problem of punching all, and the ozone with fluorocarbons. All the variables later sort of half-heartedly was given awards and things and finally much later even given a what do you call the final?

*Nobel.

Nobel Prize. Much, much later. What was his name? I can’t figure out anyone’s name. Why did I even mention him? He was the one that headed up the chemistry department. So you had these people that were just incredibly gifted. The most gifted computer scientist that I have ever known. At that point what happened is there was a school ___.

They had the computer stuff over in the sociology department. One of the people that was the head of the sociology department was terribly unhappy with IBM and so forth. IBM had come through with their quote unquote promises. So they threw IBM off the campus, literally. It became a total non-IBM campus, which was quite a trick in those days. It not only lost the key person that was the focus for computer science, but it bought back into Xerox. This was just in time for Xerox to first think they were going to make it, buy out the real time controllers, and then they came up with the Xerox something. That only _. You name it and they had something, they went down the sticks. All driven by the person in the sociology department that knew the what should be done not in the computer science department.

Miscellaneous UC Irvine

Well, there was a ___ I want to come back to again. I kept saying it over and over again, every time I’d go and measure but I find say whether you ___ when you ___ the underlying thought at all. Yet if you pick the wrong time, you can sure get a lot of rain and hail, I mean all ___ and all of California ___ quite as often as ___ you’re going to even get a tornado as ___ functions, fractal ___.

And everywhere I’ve looked in real biology, the type of ___ to work with biology, ecology, and things like that, I find situations where you have these incredibly mixed and, if you were ever able to , like I described in or like Carpland and sampling over the bridges and such, and yet always ___ wind and tide and . It is important to create a system that can deal with things like that but also isn’t either. ___ you can ___ you can ___ but that’s as far as I want to go. That’s it.

*What was the name of your major professor?

Keith Justice, and I still to this day can’t remember the __ came over from Rand Corporation and set up all the computer science department. He was 72, was an incredible person, and __ just like __ was, to him. Some time I’ll go dig out, or maybe somebody else will dig out the __ first graduating class of UCI because it has all those people in it.

*It’s on my list of things to do.

It’s all there, I think the bottom shelf, because it causes me pain. I want to cry when I think about it. It was so disastrous to the program and the department and everything, and the whole school really. They got somebody in there, I’m almost sure I’ve mentioned, came over from the social sciences that have the __ to say no, IBM will go.

Yeah, even all systems . I can remember even crawling all the way across a couple of acres of alfalfa on the or down in Irvine and one that was, the break next to the dorms. When I was living in the dorms down at Irvine __ working on my dissertation. I was crawling on what superficially appeared from the top to be a totally homogeneous uniform system. Here I was crawling along the bottom looking from the bottom up.

What I saw was every imaginable different kind say of wasp and spiders and different kinds of true bugs and I mean the list just went on forever. Very spectacular. And spiders and whatever. Talk about not, and although I went, __ knowledge really __ some kind of and then changed into it would be 40 webs of some parasite . And so on. So much for homogeneous, homogeneity from the crops.

It really struck me how __ well what superficially for most __ alfalfa field that went on forever. Looking at it that way from the underside like that very slowly __ and I found that there were things . They’d hide, move, or drop or do because I couldn’t __ so it __ a device __ and so on and so on. So that sort of echo up the thing I think you were just saying too.

*Yeah, right. So there was, so you were living in a dorm there at UC-Irvine?

Yeah, while I was getting my doctorate, with Hilary. Living in the dorms there with Hilary.

*The person I work with who is in the library system at Madison, I told her I was going to California. He said that, he started talking about this friend he had at Irvine who was in the first class.

The first class. It was a very small class, about a dozen people.

*Right, that’s what he said so he probably knows, but I don’t have the person’s name yet. Lou didn’t remember the guy’s name right off hand, but he’s going to try to track that down.

You know what I would really love to have?

The invitation copied for the first class that was ever given because you see they save all those things in a library as part of things and all of the history. It had the name also of the fellow that was the head of the computer science firm but I still can’t remember. So it so burns my mind that he should have been shot to death with a 22 because he was helping programming friend move from the apartment.

*Conway Pierce?

The fellow that was there, the head of the whole computer science department there at UC-Irvine. He also was one of Rand’s __ boy’s son. He was one of the super bright people at Rand, and he came there to Irvine to get the first computer stuff up and going. He was the main reason for my going there. It causes me such pain, I can’t think of his name. So ridiculous. It’s ridiculous, shot down by a 22 caliber rifle, bang. Dead. Right in the prime of his life.

*I’ll try to find that, I had forgotten about that.

But anyway, there is an invitation to the first group that was ever given there and it was a real mish-mash. A couple of graduate students, professors also were in it. They did their final topic needed to complete the dissertation. There was a weird grab-bag of undergraduates that managed to double-up or either were __ in or like myself, did a whole bunch of course __ to get up early and so on. And I think there were just about a dozen people at that one.

*It should be easy to find. I just haven’t done it yet.

But it’s, as I say, someday I would be very curious because there was this, I can just __ pretty little thing, it was a formal invitation to this thing and it had everybody on the list of the graduating thing, everybody was listed. It would be __.

*Ok, I’ll track that down.

So I was always going to go back and get that again and just couldn’t bring myself to because each time I wanted to, I started to cry__ I couldn’t do it. So that’s my memory, very weird memory of a piece of my history I have never gone back and looked at again.

*I was just so startled to.

What?

*I’ve known this guy for a year and this was on Monday, yeah on Monday, he mentioned, he started talking about UC-Irvine out of the blue and his friend. Hopefully I can find who this person is and he may even have a copy of that invitation. If not, I’ll go to UC-Irvine.

The library always keeps things like that.

*Yeah, I’ll just contact the UC-Irvine and get them to send you and me a copy.

Send it to you. Please send it to you. I’d rather have it go to you.

*Ok, do you want to see it?

I will see it eventually but just have them send it to you.

*Ok, fine.

Too many difficult memories. I’m starting to cry again. I’m starting to cry. So I would really __ please have them send it to you, not me.

*Ok, I will do that.

I’m fine. You see I think Hilary was there part of the time, and part of the time I was commuting from wherever we lived in __ UC-Riverside. I had been finishing up there first and at the first program thing. I did __ at Irvine to go to classes and during the next __. Both Hilary and I moved into the apartment housing there, later on.

7.1.3 UC Berkeley: Population Ethology

    5: Dave Wood & teaching, APL on UCLA’s 7091, 3-D pairs, PSW, Cyber 76,

    piece toward end on Dahlsten and Entom dept

    1: Oak Ridge meeting

    Berkeley-LLL

    MathBio

11. UC Berkeley berkeley.1-7

    Man and His Environment        berkeley.1
    
    Dave Baasch        berkeley.5
    
    Berkeley—LLL Connection        LLL.1-8
    
            Jim Barbieri        LLL.1
    
            Computers and Modeling        LLL.5
    
    Conferences        conferences.1-10
    
            New Orleans        conferences.1
    
            Oak Ridge        conferences.4
    
    Communication        communication.1-11
    
            Interdisciplinary Communication        communication.1
    
            Berkeley Computers        communication.4
    
            PDP Machines        communication.10

7.1.4 Doctorate

That was half of the other piece of my ___ got a degree in Irvine and then ___ was in that . I had a hole on my committee. There needs to be for my advancement to ___ he came up. I had been passed on to Keith Justice who was then my major professor and a mathematician. Who ___ on the Biostatistics Department at Cal-Berkeley later on, but I can’t remember his name because I’ve repressed that one entirely, also was on my committee. They had to fill in some place with somebody that had some numerical or quote unquote computer orientation, numerical orientation, not just biology. They had a ___ exam.

The person that was my ___ group that had attracted me there from biology but was in a completely different department. He couldn’t even help me zip. At least he threw out some questions ___.

I described the work I was doing, different stuff on fractals and things like that.

The guy said this man’s work is totally wrong ___ and as far wrong and so bad that it, he should be banned from the university. He laid on the rest of the committee to get me fired. Even at that point in time, still I had the highest grade point average in the school. They took me, and this mathematician later turned out that what he said was wrong. Flat wrong. Who was the person that was the head of the Biostatistics Department at Cal-Berkeley, famous mathematician and head of the department? He stepped in and took the place, when I went by to show him the stuff. What would his name be? Can you remember the name of?

*The head of biostatistics? Chin-Long Chiang?

Yeah, Chiang. He looked at the stuff and said this stuff is really weird. I can ___ but I don’t see any problems. You’re going to have to go up to the measure theory group, the people who do the stuff in measures there. Here I’m talking ___ with three guys who do stuff like the provability of the arithmetic system. Turns out the _ prove. Who was the person that made the first ___? Famous guy.

*Provability? You mean Gödel.

Yeah, right. Even just the simple arithmetic is inexhaustible, and you could formally prove it.

*Now I’m confused. Was Chiang the person who said that your work was wrong?

No, no. ___ but he wasn’t sure. I had to go up and talk with the ___ people. They stared at the ceiling for a little bit, you know, there’s no problem with this stuff. Sure was weird. I can’t understand why you’d want to do it this way but it was right. Sure is weird, but it’s right.

Chang said later on, if I was willing to completely change my major to mathematics and go to him, I could continue on and finish up my degree. But I was an ecologist, I was a computer scientist, I was an ecologist and ___ My thing just never got done, never got done. Long zigzag path for many years on the thing, totally gave up.

*This overlapped with me, yeah.

Yeah, overlapped dates where all this was happening.

*Yeah, cuz I have a copy in there of a thesis outline which has a date on it of 1973.

Yeah. Overlapped, the same thing I described.

*So you were still a student at UC-Irvine at that time or you had switched to Berkeley?

Yeah, I was a student there, but I had to teach courses for advanced, for a Ph.D. I had to teach the normal courses that you would teach for a Ph.D. It was weird because I had applied for my support for computer programming in biology to NIH. NIH actually paid for my three years of graduate work, three years of grade work at Irvine. They couldn’t find anybody to do anything with computers that had anything to do with biology. Here came my dissertation proposal and they said neat, we’ll give you a 3 year shot. They just paid it right off the top. A totally bizarre type of funding. There was no way NIH would support a thesis like that any more.

*That was in the late 60s? Is that right? It was before you came to Berkeley.

Yeah, so that must have been mid-60s. Mid-60s when I made the application, and then it ran for 3 years. It was when I went there, mid-60s. It was at the very end of the 60s when I got that top crack at teaching “Environment Crises and Complex” there at UC-Berkeley. They also were looking for people that both had a math background and had computer science program experience. They desperately wanted somebody to teach that type of material in their courses.

I got shifted from the regional group which had founded UC Irvine. I need to dig up a name but I can’t remember. There’s too much pain associated with it.

*I can find it.

Goodside, Goodside, Goodside, Goodside, Goodside. All right the founders, one in biology, one in computer science, the golden boy from computer science, were some of the greatest people I knew. They were an inspiration and were the reason why I went to Irvine. Now, one died young, got killed, and totally changed the direction of the school or as I described it in terms of their role in computer science.

I got handed onto a series of people that came into the department to manage things. I was into high level biology—population biology, behavior, ecology. Ecology was taught in the department that I was moved into. Boyd pops in my head for a name. Keith Justice was my major professor.

The mathematician I later was assigned to replace the guy that was the computer science guy when he died and dumped me out of the program of the school. I can’t remember his name either but he ended up being hired there at Cal-Berkeley.

There were some things about dates and names and people and you’ll have to go dig out because they’re important. I sure want to get the right name associated with the right person and the right thing. There were some people that were mind-boggling—authoritative, helpful and supportive.

Keith Justice’s specialty was working both for the armed services and also as a biologist. I think he came from Arizona State, from that area. He was in there using computers much earlier than most biologists. He was into more numerical type things. I was handed off to him to be my major professor because we meshed. He was the only one in the department that actually had used and programmed computers, and even done some modeling.

7.1.5 Random Numbers

Keith Justice did mouse population dynamics as his specialty. Here he is modeling the mouse population and their movement and distribution over space. What he does is to figure out where or how they go, he generates a normal distribution, one-dimensional normal, on the computer. He’d have to decide what chunk of it he was going to use. Sometimes he would use a flat random numerator which was also on the computer, for the basic points. He would transform them so they were centered on the data. He found the tails on the normal to be extremely inconvenient because they went to infinity.

Guess what? Population data didn’t go to infinity. He found that he was getting overflow problem that just wouldn’t go away. So he chopped the 2 details off normal, still more or less centered on the top on what he wanted. He found that by chopping the tails he would get a distribution that was sort of like what he wanted. He then had to do some more scaling and shifting yet, to get it along where the data actually fell in the population. He moved that data into his simulation and took one more chunk in remnant, in the population biology model.

At least he was using a computer and he would use numerical techniques. But you can’t imagine the overhead he was getting from the computer for that. Turns out the normal is not all that trivial to calculate. Even one-dimensional takes one hell of a lot of time to calculate, and then he had to follow by all this other junk to make it work.

I said, “We got our normal and we got a flat distribution thing here. I’ll go at it two ways. I’ll go at a high level from the stuff you can get to easily and then I will see how fast I’ll run at low level too by writing in assembly language.” What I’d been doing is retuning stuff for people so it would run faster. What I did is I looked at the summation statistics of stuff. I thought, “Whoa, if I added three of these together, I would get the exact equivalent in continuity of a cubic distribution in smoothness.”

All I have to do at that point is design how I want to center, by simple subtraction, and scale it. Now I know it isn’t going to minus infinity, very inconvenient since they work with positive numbers.

You really didn’t want the normal negative numbers. Qe could move it so it would fit exactly in the range of values he wanted. Yet it was this beautiful bell shaped curve that looked just like what he wanted. I asked Shelley then, the statistics that I ended up drawing these other tests. I ran Kolmogorov and other things like that to look at the frequency. I did some frequency distributions just to be sure that the math was right.

I could actually by moving the zero point using something like an inversion. I could center by subtracting from the values up to three, now go from zero to three. I would center it, then I could scale either end separately and then transform it back into the range I would want and I even have only the addition of three in the assembly language. That thing flew so fast, you could hardly see its time on the machine, with exactly the shape he wanted. So that’s an example of the sort of thing. That piece of a modeling system never did get back into this stuff here, yet it was a really neat way of approximating it very fast on the machine.

*We talked about it a couple times.

Yeah, but it never got written down and it never got shoved into anything.

*That’s right, yeah.

It’s important that that kind of stuff is in there too. Otherwise what I just described happens.

7.1.6 Whitaker

Bob Whitaker came to the college for a year of sabbatical teaching.

*Was he the famous ecologist? Whitaker?

Yeah.

*I met him once.

Neat fellow.

*Yeah, he’s really neat. Really tall, right?

Yeah. Neat guy too, and an incredible ecologist. Finally, at long last, I took my ecology course from Whitaker there at Irvine.

The first ecology course I ever had in my entire life. He was taking all this beautiful data he was generating, using mean and the variance to scale the normal distribution and relying on those after we buried our data. Boy, did I feel sad about that. But I couldn’t find any practical way to fix it, in that setting at that time.

I want to throw that one up because it’s another, a biologist who I think was neat. I had the best ecology course I could have ever had from him. At long last I had an ecology course that was real. It turned out that he just couldn’t have been a better person to take it from. But at the same time all his data was getting jammed in this normal distribution because that is what he had been taught. It was obvious his data had a center, median, mode, average, but it had a center of some kind that had to be approximated and a squared type of calculation to center along his data, regardless of how poorly it fit the data. That’s another very sad deal I had to help.

*Well it’s doubly sad because he influenced a lot of people, a lot of ecologists, a whole generation of ecologists.

There was an interesting subplot that happened. There is one program that I ran down there as part of my graduate program that I would love to have a copy of. For years they kept it locked away. They would draw it out once a year to have the class work on genetic problems, some small population genetics.

Rather than right off at the beginning in population genetics assuming panmixia an infinite stirring rate and all that good stuff, infinite size, I said, “OK, let’s take the ten divisions. Here I’m measuring out the variables in these subpopulations. Even more populations subdivide themselves down to the place where the actual interacting goes way deep down on that kind of scale.”

*Local interaction.

OK, if you can ___ local interaction of the sort, for example, the model is supposed to deal with. We’re not going to be dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of animals. Ten is a very reasonable animal size to work with. I took a population as like—I go totally off the wall trying to remember and going so many years ___.

That was mid-60s. For 30, 30 years ago, about 30 years ago I was doing that. It ___ to do was then to run, follow , putting in the actual survival rates from one generation to the next. It population size of ten I think, to see what would happen. Eventually I had a population type A, population type B, and a population AB interacting, shifting.

I had a computer run this one and . You can do the curves so the . They will fit on a nice curve ___ some rate along this little curve. If it’s equal, equal probability of ___. You start it right at the middle. Then I’ll stay at the middle and definitely, never move from there as a horizontal line.

*That’s for an infinite population.

Yeah, with ten . What I did and one of the other people that was into computers at that time, Kent Wendell, what was his name? Not ___ generation.

*Right.

What was the guy’s name that did the computer stuff with me there at Irvine? He ended up at the University of Hawaii eventually but he was the only other person doing, he was doing geometric stuff on the computer up at 91 up at ___.

*This was a faculty person at that time or a student?

No, a student, a student, one of the fellow students. A student at the time. Faculty never did this . No, it was another student. I can’t remember name. But it was important but he’s in the group of the original ___ students of the department on the Irvine, the original students population.

You ___ all this detail on forever, at least most of it ___ if you’re willing to dig for it.

Here I have this one, it should stay zero for indefinitely, and has some fractal, ___ I have ever seen in my life. Feller thought he had ___ looking distribution or coin-flipping But when you threw a little bit more structure in there, and a little bit more complicated population you got curves that are . You couldn’t believe it, and yet ___ population . It’s what I thought was right at the middle They’re going chickity chickity chunk, ___ out the bottom. Of course once I stuck it one way or the other, then it stays that ___ not very interesting. ___ go out the other way, wherever you turn, I would turn ___ just one niche, it would wander all over the place. Sometimes would cause curve ___ thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I had seen some wild fractals but I’ve always wanted to go back and look at I was really careful about going about all the random number generation, generator That seemed to be no problem whatsoever. I was checking on the ___ because I was using so many other ways. This is a very real fact, you can’t believe it, how can ___ a small population and factor all that stuff into population stuff either.

I told Whitaker about this stuff. OK, ___ what I’d gotten . He said, “Why haven’t you published it?” And then he said, what but it was also unpublishable. He sort of thought about it for awhile and then he said, “I see what you mean.” Then he locked them all away and they’d trot them out every year for ___ exercise for ___ population ___.

The other thing is this machine is cranking out all along. They’re running a ___ model 50 at that time which had enough power to run this thing, simple model. We were running it on a tape up to a line printer to get the printout. I used the line printer ___ very nice. So the distribution ___ line printer wasn’t hurting me though.

I would label, by way of ___ what was going on. You’d say which population ___ and then something ran up, I ___ functions ___ numbers ___ you could calculate arbitrary numbers a fellow’s coin-flipping ___.

That’s what I also described to Whitaker. He thought I was just about the neatest thing going. He also agreed it was unpublishable because it was so controversial. There was that. Here is this ___ going ___ hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of time to do this new experiment.

Kent Bridges was the person that was sent to computers, the only other person at Irvine that was into computers and graphics and everything like that. Kent Bridges ___ anyway Kent . OK Kent Bridges was the other person who was into computers and was into biology too. He did a lot of in ___ geometry of any kind to biology, like ___ computer as the data ___.

This one night, we went , as soon as we were done with the machine. We kicked people off in the afternoon, all night long, and the morning shift came the next morning and we were still there lots of our runs. Can you realize what a mind boggle, money ___ they thought would have come to? Mind boggling. They held a string going down the ___ of what it was costing us in real time, in real ways, real money, real money, real money.

After this little ___ I went to the department terribly apologetic. We’d gotten these wonderful results but god was it ever expensive.

The department didn’t even budget, didn’t have the money to pay for all this stuff. ___ grant applications and ___ they just had to work with. So I just socked away, you know, 5 times over Was I and Kent Bridges, we were so tired that we were drunk. That day we were really concerned because we had totally blown the department’s money.

It’s a very strange . It turns out that exactly the of what ___ for biologists to do. The department hadn’t even begun to burn the money that they needed to justify the use of ___ Here was the stuff from NSF that’s called funny money.

You spend hundreds, thousands, bucks here. You got ten ___ out there, hundred thousand there, ten bucks there, hundred bucks there, hundred thousand, ten bucks. It was all funny money and there was ___ grant. Yeah, that was an education for me too. But boy was I scared when I went to the department head on that one.

*I can just imagine.

Our department head was the great white hunter from Africa. He really was a great white hunter ___ like one. He eventually ended up going on ___ sociobiology and socioecology, he became a socioecologist I think that was the ideal profession for him after a while. Even after the great white hunter out of Africa. Here I had just blown every penny the department had and seven times over.

Supposedly I gave ___ to see the, now . For years that was the only piece of my history that was . That was still locked away ___. I’d be curious to have another look at it. I would love to look at it, refresh my brain cells again.

*Who knows? It might be out there somewhere, just got to find the right person.

Anyway ___ my ecology course which was nice of him, he was an international student. ___ seemed to have an equally ___ coin-flip He agreed that it was unpublishable after looking at it more carefully. I normal distribution and he didn’t need to constrain so much. But that didn’t go any further, and so that’s it. So that was another piece of that.

*It’s all connected.

Yeah, there’s another piece of that same thing there.

*Yeah. Any more in that direction?

That I did?

*Yeah, or that you want to talk about?

7.1.7 UC Berkeley

*What program was this at Berkeley?

Man and His Environment, Crises and Conflicts. Wasn’t that the title of it?

*I’m not familiar with the program.

OK, it was the one where you invited people from industry and you invited people from the far, maybe that was when, one of the places being where Berkeley pepper gas_ that was a very interesting experiment, experience, cuz _ looking, I was also taking some math courses ahead of track hoping I could complete my degree and the courses that I wanted in mathematics weren’t being taught at Irvine at that time. So I’d taken a year extra time off at Berkeley and it happened to correspond exactly on top of the student riots. And here the students parading around ___ do not fold, spindle and mutilate. With IBM cards , well how long had I been punching cards were an incredible improvement over the tape that I was using. But that’s all I can say . So, and it always would depend on somebody having the magic, well it’s IBM cards ___ cards were not ___ to make it actually run on the computer. There was ___ and then they’d have a hardware update, or some new software put on, and guess what, the magic cards wouldn’t work again, right? __ expert to get your deck running.

*Job control language.

Yeah, JCL, job control language, thank you.

*So that got you to Berkeley. How did you get hooked up with the forest entomology group?

Well, the thing is, you see, Dave thought he was interested at that time full even an assistant professor, didn’t have a whole lot, that much contact with the lower, undergraduate students, and certainly associate and full professors had none, zero, zip. It was almost like they had a disease that might be contagious. They kept a very large space from them. So the student riots happened there in Berkeley. Among the __ were demanded by the students sitting If you’re going to teach, if you’re going to have a functioning place You had better do something about making it possible for students that are undergraduates interested in ___ to actually see and talk with a real professor. ___ should have some actual things that have to do with their teaching skill evaluation, not just how many research grants they bring in from some research, and how many million dollars worth of research grants they bring in from the federal government or whatever. They just sat around that time, the university said OK, we’ll go for it. And we’ll insist that the professors ___ start spending some teaching responsibility ___ for undergraduate and as I say, we’ll also be evaluating how well they actually teach those courses. So this was the first time ever that that was ever done at those schools. Some places didn’t receive it too successfully and what were the places where you had the riots where they shot all those students?

*Kent State.

Kent State, yeah. So sometimes you had Kent State happening, or sometimes the students themselves __ like they did there at Berkeley. So Man and His Environment, Crises and Conflicts was the first courses that came out of that. And Dave Wood, at that time I believe he was still an assistant professor, just starting out his career, also taught the course. He also taught the same course that I taught. So he was the faculty sit-in for, in the course I was teaching to answer some kind of some more balanced view of what was needed in ecology and what was needed for the environment. And also address something to do with teaching responsibility for university professors. Always. Interesting. Dave was one of the first people into that type of instruction ___ he taught two courses, two quarter courses.

Be able to produce the only reasonable description of integrated controls and __ failures in the world and what you could do, doesn’t make it . Of course that was what the very program they on top of them. It was all supposed to be integrated control again. This whole bark beetle thing was all integrated control too, supported by EPA __ so forth. At any rate, boy talk about threads woven through it.

*That must have been about 75 or so, 74-75.

No, I was at the University till 78. 78 was when everything went boom. Wasn’t it 78? The integrated things came to an end. Yeah, that must be 78.

*So that was probably 78-79.

72, 78, which is 6 years. That was the 6 years of integrated , half carried by and then when his mathematician told him that all the stuff was wrong, he dumped me out ___ cuz Christian ___ you see reviewed the stuff and said there is no way that you can do the transformations on Poisson process, OK. That the entire paper is false. So Christian ___ told him that so he dumped me out of the program.

It turned out ___ there was one special ___ you could do that was general for a Poisson process. My entire simulation technique for high dimensionality depended totally on that special case. ___ case wasn’t true, there was no way that the technique that I’m describing for my ___ could work. So she was right in that was an absolutely crucial piece of a technique to make Monte Carlo simulation work. If she were wrong, I could only ___ distribution that you would plug through it. The concept. It turns out that you could almost solve a ___ variable and then a variable that you can, they showed a __ table data into it so you’d have ___ effects over space, and that the , then you would skip mathematically over to the last ___ or ___ back to ___.

So there again __ by that case ___ so Dave Wood steps in ___ kept the thing going for the next 3 years for the integrated ___ 6 years paid my books within the university. Some people thought it was the neatest thing going and some people were absolutely freaked out by it. The guy that was the fellow that, what was the fellow that, in the department who was the manager of the department and other things like that for a while?

*Manager of what department?

Entomology.

*Bill Waters.

No, Waters is fine but ___.

*You don’t mean Don Dahlsten. Oh yeah there was someone who.

Dahlsten was embarrassingly supportive of me and there was another fellow that was incredibly supportive of mathematical programs and then he died right in the middle of that thing. Do you remember he, and he was briefly the manager of the department, and then there were the people ___ but I can’t remember his name either.

*No, that probably happened while I was down at Caltech so I don’t remember that.

Yeah, but at any rate, so, but then the department itself was mixed. But at any rate it turns out one of the mathematical ___.

*OK, well and I’m curious, I’ll just put this out now. Where Bob Luck fit in. Did you meet him in Riverside or did you meet him in Berkeley?

Well I think he went to one of my courses modeling there at Berkeley. He also was in all the course very successfully in the modeling program for the IBP work. He just went from there on very successfully in that area. He did ___ because I’m almost sure that he hired and worked with Dave Baasch.

*That’s right.

And then things, and Dave had taken sort of a mixed bag of things that were quantitative and into building things and stuff like that, and so he used to help Bob Luck on those kinds of things as well. And then that, cuz this course made us sort of cross over ___ similarly. Dave Baasch and I. So Luck was not directly in my path, and then when he got heavily into working with doing stuff as a professor at Riverside, we lost contact for a period at that time.

It was really, really hard for Dave and I ___ said to run interference for you and Dave Baasch and actually even Bob Luck when he was very first getting off the ground. Carl Huffaker wanted to throw him out. Boy, did he think that the work that he was doing was pure garbage. He should be done. He came very close to being dumped. So life goes in the university. Part of this was trying to keep ___ where useful work could get done. Not finding that, you bled to death with too many arrows embedded in your back.

So that was what was going on there and part of the driving force on all ___ the politics, they tried to keep you and Bob out most of the time. Dave and I had to run interference for you. Carl unfortunately was mostly, he was ___ and his ___ friends from very narrow and specialized way, where he tended to be rather conservative. When we published that first ___ my dissertation work, he thought the whole world was going to come to his doorstep and they didn’t.

Christine Shoemaker told him that the math was wrong. He really freaked with what was going on and ___ me you know, that part of the program, so he just wouldn’t see it any more. At that time, Don Dahlsten and Fields come in, who, let’s see, who was supportive up there in Carl ___ growth. Don Dahlsten of course comes to mind immediately but there were some other people up there too. But at any rate.

*I’m having trouble. I have a Bill Bedard and CJ Demars are.

They’re at Forest Service.

*Forest Service, yeah. And there’s a guy named Degoe Hene.

Doesn’t sound familiar.

*No? He wrote something with Fields Cobb. Yeah, you’re talking about people up in Forest Entomology who were supportive or people?

No, Biocontrol.

*Gill Tract?

Yeah, up at Gill Tract.

*There was a guy who did modeling of cotton. He had some connection with Davis. Mickelson?

Anyway. There were some scattered people who were supportive of Bob but not very much. So that was also, at that point, of course Dave shifted ___ he gave me a safety blanket ___ to get Dave on the Forest Entomology work there. He was doing the same approach but primarily through the Forest Service and the Forestry Department and Forest Entomology within the Entomology department. With scattered people all around. What else makes sense? What other things do you want me to attend to?

Dave Baasch

The other thing that happened was through Bob eventually. After about a year of using the UC time lines and the expensive computers at Berkeley, I just managed to move up to Berkeley for a summer. Ostensibly to do some work with the Gill Tract but basically to be closer to the computers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs because time lines were expensive then. This way, basically they could fund me being in Berkeley and using the computers and it was cheaper than having me in Riverside. So eventually I ended up getting up to Berkeley. It was probably a year and a half later, two years later.

I got to know Bland pretty well because I moved into one of offices in Dave Wood’s suite. Bland was in another one. At that point we started having day to day contact. That was sort of how it started. Those were really good times for me, not just because of Bland, I mean the whole scene working with the Berkeley crew and working with Bob Luck and everything was really good but you know the science we were doing was really interesting and yeah, and the people were great. So that’s how I got involved with it, it’s all Bob’s fault. I thank him for it.

*Yeah, well I want to get his story too.

Yeah, he goes back a lot farther. I think, you know, in a lot of ways Bland was much more important to directing his career.

*Yeah, Bland talked about that a little bit. So what did you do at Berkeley that involved Bland?

Well, that was interesting. I moved up to Berkeley ostensibly to work in the Gill Tract and use the temperature chambers to grow and study California red scale on citrus. It turned out I got very little help from the group at Riverside. I don’t know why, but I always sort of wondered what happened. I proposed this experiment where I made hundreds and hundreds of lemon cuttings down in the greenhouses in Riverside. I put them in a truck and brought them up to Berkeley and was using the temperature chambers down at the Gill Tract. It turns out the technicians at Riverside never told me that California red scale will not grow to maturity on lemon. For years I’ve wondered about that. It was almost like being sabotaged. Well, whatever.

Anyway I came up basically to study red scale. I was spending most of my time down at the Gill Tract. Those experiments were supposed to take 3 months. But I got there and the temperature chambers weren’t working, so I had to learn to be a refrigeration engineer.

*Oh I remember, that’s right.

The old song, the Smothers Brothers, you know, my old man’s a refrigerator repairman. Anyway, I learned how to do that and I learned how to solder and I learned how to recharge systems. There was a triple gauge, and it was great fun. I like being a generalist but it wasn’t doing the science. You know, like every time you want to do something you have to learn to do something else first. Well I was working, see Dahlsten was down.

*Dahlsten.

Dahlsten, yeah, was down at the Gill Tract. I got to know that group pretty well. But I was doing all the computer work up on campus, so Dave Wood gave me a spare office in his suite. Bland had another one and I don’t remember who else was there at the time. Some guy was studying ants. There was an ant maze.

*Paul Tilden?

Yeah. So one of the other labs had, you know.

*I remember seeing that ant.

Yeah, ant mazes and you know strings going all over so they could get around the lab to different populations. It was pretty amazing. Never did figure quite what was going on but I wasn’t paying much attention to it.

Yeah. Quite honestly that was, to put it mildly, a political mine field. There were camps that wouldn’t admit that anything the other group did was worthwhile regardless. The whole IPSS program was sort of nearing the end of it and it was floundering on funding.

*What’s IPSS?

Integrated pest management, or IPM. I keep thinking it was IPSS but.

*I remember it as IPM.

IPM yeah. Anyway, the same program, I think it, my failing memory says it changed back when I was in the middle of it.

*Could be. Yeah, I was sort of insulated from a lot of that politics.

Well, you were just a kid.

*And I was just there for the summers too. I wasn’t living with it all year around.

Anyway, those were some of the things.

*With the modeling.

Yeah the modeling. That was the incredible part.

Berkeley—LLL Connection

*Well, there was this, how did Jim Barbieri come into the story?

See the ___ not only are you going to get together and work in a cross-disciplinary way on a problem, and work as a cooperative group, you’re going to share the data that you generate from this with each other. And you’re going to have a common data base for this whole. OK, so we put the data base up there on the 6400, didn’t have a lot of fixed ___ and even the Forest Service outside wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. So, and then they looked at the 7600 and that was too close to the campus and too political.

So guess what they did? They ___ to find a place where they could go and store the data commonly collected over the entire integrated ___ measurement and have everybody share the data across it. Everybody else’s data. It had never been done . This was the most ___ that you ever had in your entire life. You never gave your data, real or raw data, to anybody else in the world. Other than their own graduate students who went through briefly.

You just hope that the graduate ___ something with the data that was just like and yet you sometimes had to request that one, I don’t know, from 20 feet away he would ___ around the structure ___ but the reasons ____ and it was only through the leverage of man if you don’t ___ what they used to call funny money into the computer system that all of the computers are costing you three or four hundred dollars an hour even ___ some of them cost over a thousand dollars an hour, thousands of dollars. We’ll take it ___ we’ll ___ data so it’s only going to cost you a hundred dollars an hour or something like that, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour, OK?

So this is called funny money which is produced by in effect to encourage a broad use of computers . Boy there are places where I saw the team leader _ I apologize, oh my god, I just went. Several hundred thousands bucks in his last little ___ on the machine, OK? Real money. So there also was a thing, if you’re going to ___ you’ve also got to be ___ OK? And for the reason I just described, ___ so then ___ it goes on forever. With people from all over the country, OK?

Because this thing was supposed to be, the ___ was supposed to be ___ geophysical year, OK? ___ for biology and especially ecology and the environment and so it also is supposed to be this multidisciplinary ___ where everybody coordinated their work and their research and their data and everything so they can do , and it’s all here was this table that went on forever with people from all the different agencies and most of the ones from the computer science department were there, and too had some ___ and certainly ___ had their own expertise including Jim Barbieri, OK, sitting at the table, and he ended up ____ and in a ___ be done. So that’s how Jim got pulled in.

So when he was going on about this, that, or some other thing, ___ made some comment on ___ about some of the math he was doing ____, he ___ what did you say? Are you trying to blow smoke up my ? Are you trying to blow smoke up ? I said no, here is what some of the data is looking like that I’ve already got, some of the . Well, OK, well then maybe we should do this and that and that and that and that and that’s ___ so that’s how we got off on things, OK? And we found out we, again __ and did other things in ways that were complementary, but he got ___ to make some out of political ___ for NIH and NSF and ___ EPA. EPA was in there . _ and it sort of did, sort of did, and it certainly ____ than had ever happened before. Does that answer your question?

*Yeah, I didn’t know that, I didn’t know any of that stuff. He just sort of appeared one day?

Yeah, I just sort of appeared in his world and he just sort of appeared in mine, totally out of chance, you know.

*I would be around for 2.5 months and then I’d go away for 10 months and then I’d come back again. Things were different each time. I think he came on the scene somewhere around 1973 or so. The second or third year I was there, he was suddenly showing up.

*So Bland told me a story about how you two guys met but I’d like to hear your version of it.

+Oh, it was really interesting. It’s actually a very fascinating story.

+The people at, now this is the way that I remember the story so Bland can counteract it if he wants to. There was a big project that was coming up in the, as the story goes, Nixon was president at that time and was flying over the San Bernardino Mountains and said, if you will pardon the expression, these mountains look like shit.

The EPA got a hold of that and they started a project. They wanted to do a study of why the San Bernardino forest was dying and it went, it was a cooperative effort. It initially started out as a cooperative effort by the EPA.

+Livermore got involved because they were supposedly reasonably good at doing atmospheric modeling.

The problem was is that the only person that was in that group, the G division group at Livermore, who knew anything about trees was me. And the only thing I knew about trees is that they normally grow vertically, OK.

The reason that I got in contact with Bland was because I had been a park ranger at Yosemite for the summers while I was in graduate school and so they said, OK, you’re our ecologist.

*You were on the rescue team?

+Yeah, I was on the rescue team. I wouldn’t know a tree if it bit me in the butt, so they said well go out there and talk to the people at Berkeley and at that time Dave Wood was involved, Don Dahlsten was involved, a fellow by the name of Arckley was involved with soil synthesis, there was a guy by the name of Cobb, I can’t remember.

*Fields Cobb.

+Fields Cobb was involved and during that period in time, Don Dahlsten and Dave Wood were, had an adversarial role. I guess maybe that’s the polite way to take a look at it. Bob Luck was down at the University of California at Riverside and he was supposed to handle, let’s see he was going to take basically a look at some of the infection that the park people ___, he was doing a study there. A lot of it came from the Blodgett effort that Bland was deeply involved with at the time.

+So the first time I met Bland, I and Rick Pollock actually met him, and Christine Sherman, and my recollection is that we met up at Berkeley. I went up to talk to him at Berkeley and I got about a one-hour introduction to the real world of population ecology and I was never the same after that. I mean basically, it was really clear that the kind of techniques that Pollock and I were looking at were totally inappropriate for what we were going to do.

+The really interesting thing was that Joe Knox who was an atmospheric physicist at Livermore really supported the effort. I guess he sort of saw pretty much ahead of time that Bland, that Berkeley had done work, you know put it at Berkeley. Dave Wood had done work that was far beyond anything that we could give them, and he realized that using the standard techniques of population biology wasn’t the way to go. So what happened was, Joe Knox said, `Why don’t you get an office up at Berkeley and you can go up there 2-3 days a week’. That’s when Bland and I started working.

+I think the first meeting that we went to was with Bob Luck, Bland Ewing and I went to an integrative pest management meeting in New Orleans and the two significant things of that was that we, that was the initial place that I was aware of that Bland actually presented some of the ideas that he had but the other thing is that Bland won a bottle of champagne by guessing the exact number of hours that it would take to fly across country. Those were the two things that were significant.

+But, and from that point on, we started the work that actually appeared there. One of the things that we were trying to accomplish with the first report was, we were trying to define the field. We knew that population biology didn’t work ___, because there was a study done at, the precursor to this particular study was a paper that was done at Los Alamos on the Isle Royale wolf study which was a Monte Carlo calculation, but it was dependent upon densities and Bland didn’t think that that’s the way we should be going and so Dave Wood sort of pressured us to write a report and the reason that we wrote the report was that.

Can I back up just one moment. I also have very early on a memory of a huge meeting in a huge room, attended by everybody in ___ including at Livermore, including all the different people from ___.

+Was I there?

Yes.

+I was there?

Yes.

+Oh, I didn’t even remember the meeting.

And that was the very first time I ever met you because what ___ is for the first time EPA ___ were going to force people to share data and people just never did that, never had to share raw data ___ so we went there to Livermore. First they tried to find a place there at Marksland. Politically I ___ more research. Then they went down ___ to other places, to Berk ___ decided it was too cumbersome. Where’s the place he finally went?

*Oak Ridge.

Oak Ridge, OK, too far away. So guess what? Livermore is the only place that was neutral and had sophisticated computing system and computing ware to use for the huge databases that needed to be built from everything from things coming in from Alaska or everywhere else. It was supposed to be about the equivalent of __ geophysical year, to go on for years and biology could do the equivalent. So Livermore got chosen as neutral ground. It also had the expertise so there was a monster meeting where everybody from every agency and of course a large contingent from Livermore itself, including you.

+Yeah, I guess that was true. I guess that’s where I did meet you. And my recollection is that we didn’t get much of a time to talk so I came up to Berkeley to visit you.

Right.

+And that was about the point where things became significant.

But the point I wanted to make is it was a ___ maneuvering behind it.

+Oh yeah, yeah.

7.1.8 Computers / LLL / Modelling

And also there was this whole other thing of, once I happened to have computing resources that would be able to handle a terrible amount of data shared among everybody for the first time in real time.

+Bland brings up a really important point because this was another place where in some senses we were 20 years ahead of the game because though Livermore had the computer facilities, they didn’t have the databasing techniques. They had an incredibly poor databasing technique, and it was horrible, and now if you take a look at those techniques the things that we were trying to do then with manifestly dissimilar data, both in time and space. I mean some of it was, you know, year type data, others of it was in orders of seconds to minutes type data.

+Of all of that data, probably the hardest data that we’ve had to get is Rod Arkley’s data, the soil data, because Rod was, did not want to share his data. Ultimately he found out that it was to his benefit to share his data and so he became a pretty strong supporter because of the conflict between Don Dahlsten’s group over at Gilchrist and Dave Wood’s group, we were able to start getting some of the Blodgett data put into the system.

+In fact, my recollection is that by the end of the project we had designed a databasing scheme to do that and Bland and I had started with this thing here on the modeling scheme. I really do believe it was a political decision.

The things that Bland was suggesting was not what the ___ Congress in Washington, D.C. thought was state of the art. They wanted a compartment model that, I mean at that time everything was a compartment model. You did a compartment over here and a compartment over here, and then you do lines between them.

*There was a ___ model.

+Yeah and you essentially, well it, I’m trying to think of the person that was at Berkeley that was really a compartment model type of stuff.

*Yeah, I’m trying to remember his name too. Was it Michaels ___ his name.

+We wrote some papers.

+Ended up talking to a forester that came from Moscow, Idaho, in the Moscow, Idaho area who was working for the U.S. Forest Service who was really a good researcher. I mean he was good at field work and he came back after one of the infinite number of meetings that we had and Bland was not there at the time and basically told us that we were probably the only ones that were doing anything close to reality.

+He had looked at all of the compartment models, he had looked at everything that was out there, decided nah, this was all garbage and then we sent him a copy of our paper and that was about the same time that Bland wandered off to see Holling up at University of British Columbia so we were getting independent feedback from two groups that maybe the ideas that we were presenting were pretty good, or at least fared.

And please come back ___.

+But I think for me at least, I don’t remember too much about the big meeting at Livermore. I know that there was one but my first recollection of Bland was actually going up to Berkeley and I can’t even remember the name of the hall.

*Giannini.

+Giannini Hall, and sitting down with Bland and going over, and it took probably not, I was planning on spending an hour with Bland and I ended up spending 4 hours with Bland and by the time that I left, I had a key to the door and I had an office and Bland was on one side. Dave Wood was on the corner, I was off to the right, and Bland was straight down the hall and in that.

+The second most important thing that I think happened was is that from that particular meeting at Livermore, we took a trip. I and Christine Sherman and Rick Pollock. We took a trip to San Bernardino National Forest just to get a feel as to what was happening in the forest and the person that took us was essentially quote unquote “our guide” was Bob Luck, and Bob Luck. What Bland had been telling me in the office, OK, in terms of words, we saw in action in the forest. I mean we were tearing parts of trees apart and taking a look for bark beetles and taking a look at pine cone production and the rest of that sort of stuff.

+From that point on it was really clear that we needed to get the work that Bland had been doing for years out, and that came out in the first document there and after reading, well, after reading that first document, we should have published that paper. I don’t care we should have published it, but we should have published it. We should have looked at the Royal Academy or something like that. Of course you realize it’s still not too late. It’s not too late.

*No. No one else has done this.

+Nobody else has ever done this. So we’re 20 years late, we’re still 20 years earlier than anybody else. But that was my first run-in with Bland and then, well I guess as everybody who’s known Bland it took about 14 seconds to become Bland’s friend.

*Yeah.

+And it’s kind of lasted for quite a while, until he became a five millionaire or something like that with some company called Graphon, we lost contact. But yeah, Bland’s right, there was a huge meeting at Livermore but you see those kind of meetings.

You’re right also that we ___ a part ___.

+Yeah, and you know it was a political meeting. We have to understand that. It was a political meeting so the movers and the shakers, the guys from the EPA and from, well guys like Joe Knox and the people from Berkeley that came down for the meeting basically dominated the meeting. I mean it was more of a management type of meeting. I don’t know about Bland but management has not been a forte with me and I think we just sort of sat in the back of the room.

+I’m pretty sure that it was Dave Wood that made the invitation to come up and visit Bland, because Bland and I talked probably not more than 10 minutes down there. Not more than 10 minutes and that’s why I flashed on the meeting. I do remember going to Berkeley though and I do remember talking to him for an extended period of time and saying OK, we’ve got to reconsider everything that we’ve done, everything that Livermore had come up with.

+I’m going to be critical of my home. What Livermore did is they figured that the meteorology problem, the atmospheric physics problem was, had all of the answers and that basically the biology portion of it was just an add-on. It was just tacked on. It was nothing that was important was going to happen there and I’ll be really honest with you and you know Joe Knox is my boss, he’s very impressive, and I said OK, yeah, you know all we do is we make a third order correction to the ___ solution, we’re done, we’re out of here. We’re going to collect a trillion dollars and we won’t have to do any work because we had the computer codes to do the deposition.

+Another important person in that whole problem, and I don’t think anybody has ever given him credit, but he was also really important was a guy by the name of Miller. Do you remember Miller?

No.

+He was a biologist for the U.S. Forest Service and on the second trip, he had developed a system where he bent rubber inner tubes into a U and basically what he had come up with is probably the world’s simplest method for measuring oxidants because rubber crystallizes in smog. So what would happen is he would stick these things all the way up these gullies. He must have did every gully in the San Bernardino National Forest and what he would do is he’d stick these things on the gullies. He would go back periodically and find out how much the rubber inner tube had crystallized. That was a qualitative measure of the amount of pollutants that were being ___ up the canyon.

+Miller was another one that said Livermore is doing everything wrong. So between him, Bob Luck and Bland. Well, Bland. Bob Luck and Miller knew what we were doing wrong but they had no solution. Bland knew what we were doing wrong but he had the solution, and you know that, and he still has the solution. He just hasn’t done anything with it. But that was fascinating. That was a fascinating time.

Well you don’t see any problems with it because __ scared the __ out of Jim Barbieri. Then he presented the whole thing to the mathematician from the group there at Los __. I guess what the fellow said that he complimented him for finally giving a lecture that hadn’t bored him to tears because most of the time he wished he was out the door or doing something else. Here at least 5 distinct things that he had never heard of before had been throw out at him. As far as he could see, all 5 of them were ok. Wasn’t it something like that? I’m not sure, I’m just trying to think back. But any rate, something like that happened.

*I haven’t heard that story. I’ll have to ask Jim about that.

Please ask Jim about it because this was the mathematician there that was in charge of things there at Livermore and his general comment was, `Whoa! You know I come to things and I’m bored out of my gourd with what goes on and __ bored, and here at least 5 new things were thrown at me in the course of going over the stuff and at the same time I can see no problem with them.’ So something like that, you know, from time to time __ heavy duty mathematician to the extent they’re engulfed in a related area there, they sometimes find intriguing.

7.1.9 Conferences

*Well, I wanted to talk about the modeling bit and there was all the work we did and the people around that and then there was a conference that you went to. I think that was up in UBC, so I want to sort of touch on all of that stuff, or some of that anyway.

I guess with the trip back to Tennessee and things like that, that you, you didn’t go on. Jim and Dave, I think both ___ Jim went on. I don’t remember who else went from the group. Jim certainly was there.

*Is that the one where Jim got you drunk and you started talking?

Yeah.

*Yeah, I want to hear about that too.

And that also was the one where, OK, that definitely was the one. So Jim Barbieri, that was the time, Dave Bausch was at that one too because apparently there’s stuff he’d never heard, this population stuff, and almost certainly you come in it afterwards, you know we just sort of snowballed from there. Wasn’t he there at that meeting or?

*I wasn’t there so I don’t know.

Yeah.

*I’ll ask him.

*So, well, should we start with that meeting? Do you want to talk about that meeting in Oak Ridge?

Probably not because it was way out of proportion in post proportion, in ___. It was just another, it was just an ongoing chapter in stuff that had been going on for years.

New Orleans

___ where Dave ___ present the modeling program, I mean the ___ program ___ and I said no Dave, that’s not appropriate, that’s not my area of expertise, most of the design of the program was outside of my, most of the original research was done with chemistry and ___, should be done by somebody that had contributed in some way to these things, and he said no no no, it’s time for you to branch out into these other areas and also it’s time for you to involve yourself in some of these, what do you say, sort of cross, more cross-disciplinary approach to some of these.

That meeting was sort of a disaster that I was really very upset about because I didn’t either present my stuff well or Dave’s stuff well. Cuz lots of stuff that Dave did, it was really good and all its behavioral attraction type things ___ unraveling, chemistry, the chemistry was very elaborate and sophisticated, some of the chemistry that was done, some of the chemists should have been there at that meeting, not me. I have, it is true, I did earn my living in chemistry for many years but it has to be a chemistry __ stuff I did.

You just can’t jump into any old field and just instantly become an expert in it, so, and the other thing is the Oak Ridge meeting was really a downer. I haven’t got, although it pledged ___ there, it was also again an extremely, the idea that the biological world had ___ the only reason that it didn’t, we weren’t able to have a ___ haven’t gotten just the right ___ difference ___ future, and it was almost a religious feeling in many people. Both engineers and mathematicians of the time. So that was another thing that ___.

*Mathematical biology. There were a lot of models around that time which had nothing to do with anything you could really collect.

You’re right. You run tests.

*Yeah. It took at least another decade for people to start building models that were more focused around data. The interesting thing now is that there are devices to collect incredible amounts of data and some of these questions are starting to become, people are starting to ask about them in new ways cuz they’re now collecting the data and trying to figure out what to do with it. You know, having GPS global positioning devices that are accurate to a foot, or a couple feet, I guess a meter, and putting those on animals and then tracking them over time.

*I guess you could start by how you first met Bland.

I first met Bland in New Orleans. I was a grad student at Riverside working for Bob Luck and had been going through various stages of development. I was in the masters program. I figured I probably wasn’t going to get a Ph.D. but I’m not sure the school knew that. Anyway, I started working for Bob after some messy social experiences. He took me in and started getting me involved with his group of cohorts at Berkeley, which included Bland, Dave Wood and Dahlsten and the whole Gillt Tract crowd, and actually Barbieri at the same time. But I was at Riverside. You know, Berkeley was this pie in the sky place with an incredible reputation obviously and I was this clown from Riverside.

I started working with him and he liked me because I was a combination of a biologist and a computer geek which in 1970 was a little more rare than it is now maybe. I got involved in one of the integrated pest management programs. Bob was working with citrus, so we ended up going to one of the annual meetings in New Orleans. I hadn’t met any of these people before, so I ended up in a major conference with basically Bob Luck, Bland, and Jim Barbieri sitting together. Since they were good buddies I sat with them. For Bob it was natural. It was really amazing because there were a lot of very good, very respectable people there.

I was coming in this from—I mean I’d had a lot of stat, I’d had a lot of biology, a lot of math. I was a weird biologist in that I had been planning on going to UC San Diego, where every undergrad for the first two years takes the same curriculum with two years of calculus and higher math. I’d done that and then I went to Riverside. Most of the bio majors had taken one quarter of calculus because that was required, but it wasn’t even the calculus math majors took. At Riverside I was taking differential equations, advanced differential equations, linear algebra, all this other stuff, a couple of topology classes. All the other biologists were sort of wondering what was wrong with me. I had an unusually good math background for a UC Riverside student.

*Right, I think I have a couple of your books actually.

Yeah, I sold some of my stat math books off to friends when I realized I was not going to need them again. Not because I ever understood them, but because I wasn’t going to do that professionally.

I was hanging out with Barbieri, who was the bear from Livermore, and Bland, who Bob Luck had talked about for years as one of his mentors and people that enlightened him and that he had taken some math classes in statistical ecology or something from. I don’t really remember.

The four of us were sitting back there looking at these people give presentations and listening to them and making snide comments between us. I realized that we really weren’t part of the crowd. We were like the peanut gallery, the completely different view.

I was afraid to say anything because I actually at that point hadn’t had a lot of respect for the statistical correlation models that were going on in the field at the time. You measure 22 things and make predictions from them.’Wait a minute. Correlation and causality. Does anybody know that there is a difference between them?’

Bland and Barbieri have a whole different tack. They use models, they want to use models, to better understand the problem, not to predict based on no understanding. We sat there and were making snide comments and I’m thinking these things, not saying anything. Barbieri and Bland and Luck are reading all this the same way only they’re being vocal about it and asking questions. We’re getting dirty looks from people and people aren’t understanding the questions.

It was really a pretty amazing environment, pretty amazing place. As a grad student I got to admit it was my first big meeting where I was really expecting to participate because Bob was presenting a paper that he and I had written.

Anyway, Bland. I don’t know how to describe what I thought of him at the time. It was all combined with everything else. I mean this was pushing 25 years ago anyway. But one of the interesting things was that after the actual conference sessions, he wanted to go listen to music. He wanted to go do things. He wasn’t like some of the other people who just want to go, sit around the bar and talk business.

I mean he was in New Orleans. He wanted to go do other stuff. We went out to listen to jazz a couple of times. We went out to the Heritage Jazz Hall or whatever it is. These are all things I’ve done them with him. It was interesting because for me it was one of those new grad student experiences. But the other thing that was really neat was the almost instant acceptance of me. Maybe it was based on making the same snide comments, I don’t know. You know we sort of clicked and that was real nice.

Oak Ridge

The standing joke was that’s the way you could always tell a biologist was to give him two numbers and he immediately would add them together and divide by two. Or do you remember that when we went to one of the modeling meetings? That was a comment of the engineer sitting in the meeting.

*I don’t think I went to that meeting.

It was the one where I also told you about the modeling stuff and all those things, back East, it was where we did all this original modeling stuff. Or maybe you didn’t go to, maybe.

*I didn’t go.

No, you didn’t go to that one. Jim was the one that went to that one.

*Yeah, he’s told me about that. Yeah, but I’d like to hear about it from you. Maybe sometime this weekend.

But the thing is, is that what happened is that. So they were joking around, you know, and he was saying, Andrew who was leading the whole thing: “All biologists, you give him two numbers and he would add them together and divide by two.”

*So is this a good point to talk about that Tennessee conference?

Sure, because that’s, it was just along that sort of thing, it was later but another port in the same chapter of things going on like that at that point in time but it had been, all of ___ you can’t give this much money to people, it’s a huge program, and not make sure that somebody’s, making sure that they’re going to ___ of all this money, and those results, they meant that reasonable things had to be done in the way the data was collected and so people could actually ___ ways out of the ___ handle, manipulate data and formats and all that jazz and ___ had to be done to ___ the money. To manage ___ and so the Tennessee was picked, one they would be ___ centers where the program was held so it had some of the characteristics of ___ database ___ friendship, Jim Barbieri ___.

I knew that what he, from there I mean nobody and so another place that is real and where the DOD has always held force is where all the regional ___ stuff and the weapon stuff was done. Part of it was done at ___ Oak Ridge, so that’s the reason Oak Ridge was chosen to try to get ___ and also because they ___ the Oak Ridge people. Very technically sophisticated, mathematically oriented, very good engineering, and so that’s really every branch of ___ some representatives to that meeting that had ___ partly to the technical side of things and partly because they were people ___ and so ___ a responsibility. I guess that’s why you didn’t get sent ___.

*I was even an undergraduate, not even a graduate student.

So, anyway, some people sent there were people that represented, they were, ___ sent two or three people including Jim. And this is supposed to be a show and tell and I wouldn’t even try to guess the date because I can’t remember, I ___ avoided going ___ and everyone wanted me to do everything. Again I will talk, sort of what happened and why and what was going on. Well I ___ dates ___.

*I can get that from Jim. I’ll get that from Jim and Dave.

And so one of the things was I think you know back in 34 they had just come out then and Jim and I ___ that one because I mean.

*I remember your’s, yeah.

The first time that the whole ___ and it also was a time of, to do a show and tell ___ and here, first they ___ and discuss and now they’re going to talk about . How this we’re supposed to be integrated together and how we’re going to share and then he goes off on ___ for the day, you know, here are all these biologists here. Mainly our crew around here is mostly mathematicians and engineers, OK, mostly mathematicians ___ . They’re totally ___ visitors to this site here because we just build bombs, bigger and better bombs and bigger and better reactors and we build nuclear materials that are of the detonator part of bombs, OK?

And he said well, you know you can always tell ___ biologist ___ you give them two numbers and they’ll immediately add them together and divide by two. That way you can distinguish the biologists like that. So that’s what the kind of flavor that things got off to. Not very fun. Not very fun.

*Them and us.

Yeah. So anyway when I got up to discuss what we were doing and the kinds of ___ modeling we ___ and they just ___.
So what I said was you can always tell an engineer,

you give him two numbers and they subtract one from the other and divide by the distance between them and the whole audience broke up because apparently that nailed exactly between engineers and biologists perfectly. There could be no better way, and ___. Biologists with numbers in constant averages. Anyway.

So in many ways, the meeting just sort of degraded from bad to worse to worse to worse to terrible, and so that night I felt terrible and we all went out to a bar together from the Berkeley group after being ___ all day long feeling terrible. I tell you what, we ___ and I’m like, I don’t drink much. I’ve always drank all my life but always been a ___ I’ve never been a tea-totaler, I’ve loved wine and beer and everything like, but ___ I’ve used alcohol ___ but on the other hand there are times in my life when I’ve really liked going ___ alcohol is about the nicest thing I can ___ so I just had one beer after another.

I think I only had beer but I am not used to it. But I’m sure I had a lot of it and Jim started throwing out some things about college and ___ and different things ___ Caltech and I thought who, somebody was from Caltech I thought, but maybe not. No, I don’t think so. It was only, just indirectly, through places like . No. You would have been from Caltech .

*I wasn’t there.

So anyway they got the guy drunk and I started telling the stories that I just told you, some of them, and he tells they’re pretty funny I guess, particularly since they were half drunk and I was half drunk and these are the sorts of stories that I normally never told. I almost never tell those kinds of stories but this time it just was very appropriate and ___ you know ___ the base assumptions ___ about quantitative when it comes to science, and the more you get into ecology or the things that are really complex, it is especially ___ and so at that point Jim jumped in and ___ about the fact men, you can’t just carry on like that, what are you talking about?

So I said yes I can, look at this, and so then I jumped into a description of modeling stuff I’d been building and doing and so forth and this is the first time Jim and Bob Lark and Dave ever heard anybody doing this ___ or . It must, I guess, and also because I was roaring drunk, very angry, and very frustrated with my data, you know I really cut loose about it and I guess they would just never let go of that I guess which is nice because you see that book right there, all those because you know I’ve got , can you come back and write a few things, you know, more about it, and then they’d drive me off and back at Berkeley, ___ me off ___ Berkeley.

They had me sort of go over the same material again and this time both Jim and the other people ___ some notes at least cuz I had a writing disability that really gets me ___ upset or ___ then it comes, then it really, I have some real trouble writing then if I, you know, emotional kind of snit that I was in at the time, and so Jim took ___ and Dave ___ in his bit because he had a more mathematical biology mix and Bob lecture in biology reality, biology reality, maybe with the quantity but at least he understood how the biology ___ and he kept telling the other guy, hey from the biology this is good ___ biology, and they both kept ___ from the statistics ___ which had been sort of working on to try to apply numerical ___ and he’d say one of the areas that Jim overlapped was . Well using ___ tremendously complex not only systems that he had to work with so they started talking about ___ simulation . That part sounds right. So that’s where that went and I guess that thing as the original.

*Wow. Well I remember some of those discussions we had in the summertime. We’d get into talking about fractals and fuzzy sets and nonstandard analysis and how all these things fit in with this modeling. It’s really, I’m not sure what’s going to happen with this.

No, it’s a real bear ___.

*Bland mentioned also a meeting at Oak Ridge.

+Yeah. That was an interesting meeting.

*When was it?

+That was early in the years of the project. I believe it was 71-72 time frame in there, it was very early, and the reason that we went to that meeting. Oak Ridge has a problem. They’ve got all of the world’s uranium sitting in one place, in a factory built in 99 that leaks, so they had a really, really bad environmental problem and what they were trying to do was to at least quantify how bad the problem was.

+If you’ve ever been to Oak Ridge, Maxine lived there during the war, but Oak Ridge is near Knoxville. I believe it’s about 30 or 40 miles from Knoxville, but Oak Ridge exists on the Clinch River, and the Clinch River is one of these meandering rivers that I guess all of Tennessee, everything is a meandering river.

-It was flat.

+Yeah, and it’s really flat but the problem was is that they were getting plutonium that was leaking out of the factory in miniscule amounts but over the lifetime of plutonium it’s going to be there __ years so what was a miniscule amount today, 30 years from now is going to be significant.

+Oak Ridge at that time had the only databasing scheme in the world that handled dissimilar data. They were actually looking at soil data, they were looking at vegetation data, they were looking at air pollution data, they were looking at air monitoring information and they had the exact qualities that our data had, except it didn’t have dynamics. They never worried about the effects of ___ senescence on a tree over a 20-year time period. All they had was trees that were dying and trees that were, so it was a very static data base.

+But the qualities that it did have which were really important was it had huge time variances from data that occurred every 15 minutes to data that occurred every 20 years so if you do, if you do the calculation of splitting 20 years into 15-minute intervals, you get a lot of data, and they were having a lot of trouble archiving the data. We, in retrospect, we should have used the Oak Ridge databasing scheme as opposed to the Livermore databasing scheme. And the reason is, is that we tried to modify a databasing scheme that was totally inappropriate for the task that we were doing. If we were to do the same thing today, we’d be using something like Oracle or probably SciBase System or something like that.

+That was another thing that Bland did which was sort of fantastic. He pointed at that particular time to a new scheme that had been developed at Berkeley called the Relational Databases, as opposed to going to these hierarchical structured systems. We just do everything in a relational database. Again that work was essentially poignant. It hadn’t been delivered to a point where we could even use the scheme yet but it was the direction that we would have gone, so it was kind of an exciting.

+The outcome of the Oak Ridge project or the Oak Ridge trip was two-fold. We came away with a sociological problem which is basically how do you share data and yet make sure that the individual resource, researcher, has some sort of control over his own data? To be really honest with you, I don’t think we ever solved that because we failed miserably with Rod Arkley. I know we failed miserably with him. I mean he would stick his data into the database and if you didn’t have the right set of passwords, he couldn’t get his own data out. It sounds like, you know, we’re back to security type things again so.

Oak Ridge, thank you. The Oak Ridge meeting, that he was sent to, you weren’t there if I remember.

*No.

I’m almost sure you weren’t there.

*No. Dave Baasch was there.

Yeah, Dave Baasch was there, but basically that time everything really fell together when I said, `Whoa, there are about a dozen pieces. Partly the stuff __ needed to be new, but about a dozen pieces.’ That’s why I dumped it on everybody while we were still there at the Oak Ridge meeting actually, with Dave Baasch and Jim Barbieri.

It was Jim Barbieri that then helped me get that into a rhythm form, and how he interacting with Dave Wood. Yeah, Dave Wood was the other reality check on biology __ using the systems that needed to be used in real biology. So basically Dave Wood, Jim Barbieri, and myself just sat down, the three of us, and spent weeks first and then it was actually the other piece that we over months, the three of us, interacting back and forth. __ get the modeling system up and going. There it is right there. So that was the first __.

*I wish I had been there.

I do too because it was missing a mathematician touch. Yeah the mathematician touch. But fortunately, we had laid enough pieces in place, I had __ with the stuff you and I had done together with Dave Wood. Dave Baasch and Dave, Dave wasn’t the one I’m trying to say. You and myself were thrown together by Dave Wood to get some of the things up and going so we had already taken __ the first cuts on some of the math that we needed __ also they have __ meetings too. Boy, talk about old reminiscence. Well, actually this is another chunk really is that whole thing __ various stages it was possible to.

*I heard that there was a regular meeting but then several of you, I think Bob Luck was there too, wasn’t he?

Yeah, Bob Luck.

*Yeah, you guys went out for beer.

Yeah, did we ever.

*Yeah, I heard you drank more beer than anyone has ever seen you drink. And then you just started talking about all this stuff.

Oh yeah, at Oak Ridge.

*Developing the ideas.

Got me to loosen up enough to __ talk about this stuff. They lubricated me and I __ let my brains down too much. Yeah, it was really frustrating. It was __ mathematician, an engineer, doing all these things to the post decimal place where I was feeling like you’re going to be getting __ magnitude or __ magnitude if you’re careful. There also was that.

7.1.10 Interdisciplinary Communication

Bland was doing absolutely amazing things independent of his modeling work, data representation. Even then he understood that biologists weren’t mathematicians. They were good at visualizing data. If you could present things right, they can come up with incredible intuition, insights, understanding of what was going on. If you could just present the data to them correctly.

He was always very cross-cultural in terms of mixing biology or people with math. The way he thought about things was not cross-cultural in the science and humanities dichotomy. He knew he didn’t think like everyone else. He was always trying to take things from his diverse interests and present them, make them useful. This was one of his challenges.

He actually did this and had some working versions of it. I’d look at them in the lab and I’d go `Whoa’. I’m not sure visually I’ve seen anything as revolutionary, as really different as this since then. I haven’t been looking I admit but in terms of representation this was probably as radical as the difference between the Macintosh and a DOS machine when Mac came out in 84. It was just a whole new way of representing everything and I don’t know why it never caught on. Maybe just there weren’t enough people around that could figure out how to do the modeling. Maybe there weren’t enough people that were working from aerial photographs. If you don’t have the aerial photographs as the background, then you have to develop the whole thing that way. Obviously, computer graphics in, we’re talking mid-70s.

*The graphics weren’t there.

Wasn’t there. So you know there was no other way to do it.

I mean that’s the issue I’ve kept coming back to because people have finite money and finite __ and computer cycles, computer memory, are still not free. So I guess there’s an underlying thread on all this stuff really. Is there a possible way of doing modeling that makes it biologically realistic and that __ keeps it within people’s budget and computers have budgets and things like that. __ amount of storage and amount of time, num, cycles taken to do the work literally because that’s what ends up costing you money in the long run. So __ basically there is, that __ seem to have people to work related to the program __ going through that first step of making it to calculate numerically.

*No, I don’t think so. There’s one person I just learned of who is doing some modeling and I haven’t heard his name before. I’m still trying to track, I just learned about it on Friday before coming so I haven’t tracked that down.

Current person or a person long ago?

*Current person. He’s someone who I can perhaps share some of this modeling and get his interpretation, his ideas on it. Something he might be interested in pursuing.

Anyway, the point to be made is that the modeling representation must not only not obliterate the realistic biology __ present the thing in a realistic model but also has some other criteria. It needs on one hand to be able to be broken down into bits and pieces and components. It makes sense to a biologist, it makes sense to a geologist, it makes sense to a chemist. So the subdivision process that goes on has to be simple and very general but also relate to things that people can measure and see and say in a very intuitive way. __ intuition. Ideally you want to __ what’s intuition so the various scientists from their various fields can __ don’t even to shift gears. The more __ saw people having to shift gears into a new mode and different rate of doing things __ problem was total misrepresentation of what was going on. Either total misunderstanding in one direction or they were sometimes, I always said it was intentionally __ get on with the funding agency. Whatever.

So, on the one hand, it really is cuckoo that the __ process that goes on, that makes the model simple there for people in the field to relate to what’s being actually measured under real conditions. It’s a __ that make a biologist __ comfortable than make a chemist comfortable and it’s a different one yet that makes a geologist comfortable. So you’ve got to do something that’s very __ in the way it __ problem so you can even go __ with each other in the same room hopefully. So that’s a really important aspect of any modeling technique or procedure. __ is it has to be computable on real world machines in real world time __ people are __ computing facility really available because __ time to run some model of their own equal to __ one-tenth to the tenth to the tenth __ universe __ time. Pretty easy __ reach that kind of scale.

*Oh yeah.

Surprising how easy it is to find a problem that will take that kind of computational load. So that’s another whole issue. Somehow you got to dodge around that bullet too.

*Well if natural systems had to make all those calculations at the speed of our computers, then life would cease to exist.

Yeah, depending on evolution on computers. Very abruptly come to an end. So it’s also that it, in the process of __ realistic model, it doesn’t explode computational. Even times like over memory or sometimes even both.

Looking like modeling approaches, many __ it had to be somewhere __ keeping things __ budget. And it did, ideally, you’d __ a modeling approach that was you could actually build a multiple models of hypotheses. That’s the way the world really works, just like __ tree. Biology __ right in the middle of that, you have this tree dying by bark beetle __ attack __ just totally __ damage . there is that you got to need to be able to explore hopefully. Then another whole thing __ was that it looked like it __ statistics __ statistics it, you know it’s amazing. I went back and looked in Mandelbrot’s book. __ the name won’t, the statistician at the finite __ zoologist, way back in the 50s.

Under the underpinning of all this stuff was the idea that it had __ economics to do the modeling cuz it was just too expensive to do. Computers were expensive, people’s time was expensive, research effort and __ are expensive. The whole thing costs lots and lots of money and so somehow there needs to be a way of making the investments that you have already made in something like a bark beetle bug pay off as much as possible. In showing you what __ interaction between even disease organisms and the tree and the beetle and the so forth and its contours __.

It is a very high interactive system and it stays and it stays 22 years or even 30 years for some things and . That’s a long investment and you can’t __ per year because that __ only a few percent of value at most, to not have something be far more costly than it’s worth because that was a whole nother thing. How to get the most payback from the modeling . In terms of what it would do for you as a biologist and scientist. I was trying to extort the system like that. Especially when they’re so structured and . You could revisit it and remeasure stuff and verify things and see how things were going. If it’s going to be __ have to cut down __ and at the same time __.

An incredible amount of structure that every biologist knew but no single biologist knew. So the people that were expert in soil were different from the people in disease organisms, were different from bark beetle experts, were different from __ that looked at the trees. So how do you get them talking to each other? Sometimes __ since ultimately the people in this kind of a group __ groups of people they really had some pretty bad experiences with __.

So they were real happy to have lots of math __ sometimes __ that way of interacting and just find data and bring things up and more tied to how they do their daily works anyway. Actually this is where we got some of the first stuff out. It’s the first __ mine was a 3D model __ a vector that we got off and running on a system that was actually using the same interpretative system that was interpreting __ photography in maps and data.

We had a small system that would be portable and the idea there was this __ put two pieces of the world was __ to all the investigators in the program. That kind of direction should be pursued further. At the heart of the system is the kind of data that it should generate and the kind of external(?) data that it should be able to use and then the kind of results it should be able to spin out the other end. __ tied to that kind of math, and __ natural data and graduate from things like that that the people were already using anyway for that system. So that was there.

I think we’ll try to put this thing together and using the data in some way that might be far more . At least they could relate to a picture of a forest, a picture of some graphs that were just superimposed on top of a forest and maps and things like that. So that’s also where that stuff was headed, to do that type of thing. The fact that trees weren’t perfect circles and although you may be interested in a polar kind of relationship from the tree. The more that we __ other ways of representing spatial information the better.

7.1.11 Berkeley Computers

I said to Dave Wood, APL looks like a good ___ language. It’s available, should be possible to teach a course where I could cover all the theory stuff and all the mathematic stuff. The most a person would need to do is count on their hands, dah dah dah. He said, “That sounds like a great idea.” I taught the first APL course partly to ___ I actually got the first lines up and running between UC Berkeley and the IBM 7091 at UCLA, which was really the line for another thing.

*Yeah, I worked on that.

Talk the old 91. I __ and made it so that one ___ was IBM again. It was the most powerful super computer in the world, the 91. But apparently they lost big bucks on every one of those machines because they were so expensive to produce. All the other machines did everything but __ with micro-programming. That one did it all with hardware, and the hardware was very expensive. Trying to make hardware fast enough that ___ Niagara Falls to air condition the damn thing. You ran the 91; you know what I’m talking about with the 91.

*Right, I worked under you on it.

That’s right.

*You introduced me to it.

I’m crying.

*This is our common history we’re talking about now.

I’d forgotten that.

I was in partly from the super computer 91 ___ or I was using a CDC. Actually, I couldn’t even begin to run the programs that I was running at that time on the CDC 6400 on campus. They were really unhappy about my going off campus. You had everything preset, where you could go and what budgets you could use on and on and on. But we needed the power of the 76, CDC 7600 to be able to run the programs.

*Right, the Cyber 76.

It was the Cyber 76 or it was the IBM 360 91, the two super computers at that time that were pressing the limits of what you could do at the time in terms of computing speed and power. They were pushing one machine Peter said we just threw out the last of all our data. That was the last piece of data that we actually hung onto from the project. It looked the most interesting and we also were wondering if someone would close that back for the APL ___ that was being done, but nobody ever did. He sent me all his momentos. ___ nobody would ever use them again either. But they were what was needed. I always ___ sent me from one of his glass-blowing from APL, from that group. Sometimes I’ve held onto my history and sometimes I haven’t. It’s varied.

*Well some of that stuff may still exist. I talked to Dave Wood last week and he thinks that Don Dahlsten has some of the material and he has a, and David Wood has a cabinet in his office, a locked cabinet which has some material. So I’m going to try and look at that in January to see what’s there.

That’s what’s behind all this. Oh twists and turns. So the other thing that’s been happening is I went, I couldn’t find work with the university, I searched all over at the end of the NSF grant to do this kind of work on the integrated control, OK, integrated control type of mology to see if we could pesticide __ high level of test control of introduced ___ just clobbering we used to call it spring and count biology which I didn’t much like, you know, using normal biology ___ what’s first and broad spectrum insecticide and go from there.

*I first met you in the summer of 71, after my first year at Caltech. I had originally planned to have a job at Lawrence Berkely Lab with ___, because I had volunteered there the previous summer. The person I worked for, up in building 50B—that is where they had the computers, the 6400 and later the 6600 and then the Cyber 76 that we used in subsequent years–promised a job. I think that the grant came through in a smaller amount and suddenly I didn’t have a job for my first summer.

*My dad just coincidentally went to lunch with Dave Wood and said, “I’ve got a son who’s got an interest in math and some interest in computers.” I didn’t have skills at that point. I guess I’d worked a little bit. I was looking for some sort of job. Did he know of anything? Dave said, “As a matter of fact I do.” That’s how I ended up in your lab.

That’s intriguing. So it was actually a friendship and contact between Dave Wood and your father?

*Right.

That set everything up. And of course it just, your ___ mix of skills in that but we just are . Things took off. dimensions are you, so you ended up both working upon the 76, 6600 76 Cyber and the 360 91 on the ___.

*Yeah, that’s right. And that virtual APL machine. It was hidden away.

By that time Dave Wood had some of these grants. OK, this must have been at the very beginning of the IPM program with a number of grants and awards. ___ took us through to do something , get computers and predictability more into forest management. They thought computers would help them with the quantitative work they were doing there. They were punching a lot of cards and putting them through a card sorter, sort of like the population people with their Census. That was about as far as they had ever gotten with stuff. They had some roles that were other punch cards that they punched, they used to those needles. By hand with needles.

Needless to say, computers were capable of working a little better and faster on that kind of stuff. It was that kind of environment you got hired into, to see the degree that all of those kinds of things could be replaced with data on computers. It could be stored more reliably than cardboard punch cards. They couldn’t even hold that much data really. If you look at the number of fields, you really could sort them and manipulate them by just notching a few edges of a card.

You had __ degrees of freedom where you analyze the data. You couldn’t use counts of anything, and you couldn’t punch in very much, say location information. What are the map coordinates? What are the altitudes? What was the weather? That didn’t get in there at all.

What you were developing into was the same kind of vacuum I had ___ myself been dropped into. There certainly should be ways of using the computers for this. Cut way back on the work and greatly increase the flexibility with all that is done. So that was one more big thing that was behind all of this stuff, and it never ends. It just was sort of an open-ended problem. There’s always some new way or some new technique or some new method of getting data, new things of setting up the experiments. The goal was to be able to make ___ a good systematic experimental design.

Where there was no systematic design before, where often the layout was just very unsymmetric. It was very hard to work out symmetry problems from the topography of the layout of the Sometimes it was very mild, and then uneven distribution of trees. The fractal ___ distribution that time for ___ ways of looking at it, on to spacing, if you looked at it in detail.

For that all of those reasons, we found that there was some real remarkable ways of improving things using a computer. Usually that fit right square into being able to help That is also why we dodged around the 6400 on the campus, all that by powers that be. We were faculty there on campus, so too bad, goodbye. What we did was go through the Forest Service with their funding because they could directly fund the Cyber up there on the hill. APL was so far beyond what it could do that it was mindboggling, to say nothing of the sophisticated lab and the stuff up there on the hill.

We couldn’t go directly from the campus interestingly enough because of the political wars that were going on at that time.

*Right, and at that time the 6400 was the only computer available on campus.

There were of a pair of them. One they were using for trying to work out the first interactive system running on a computer. It turned out to be such a cumbersome interactive system that They ended up giving away free time on the 6400 for interactive type thing. It was so cumbersome and so difficult. Their interactive machine was gross. If I should ever They finally gave me and some of the other people down there on campus free time just so they could ___ It still didn’t have any takers at free. There were some interesting political wars going on on campus.

You wouldn’t think it would, but they ever the driving forces of some of the things that happened.

One of the directors of the computer system, what was his name? He was from the business school and he was the first person that started using APL off campus. What was his name? He was sort of a cripple as I remember. He was from the business school. He was the first pioneer to do APL. As he described it, boy was there blood on all the decks. Mostly his blood. He had been director briefly of the computer center and he also had an academic position in the business school. I ___ sort of beaten down in the business school by himself. Doing his own APL thing because ___ group do business programs very quickly and easily with the matrix was really the set-up on APL. They could even teach you to do that anyway.

I think he even had some ___ that were running over in San Francisco too. But I was the first one.

*Yes, at UC-SF, yes. Yeah, that’s right.

Something __ over in San Francisco for him. We were the first ones that went off campus to the 360/91. We pioneered that, and we also pioneered the high-speed link to get it together ___ and ___ explosion. Things exploding without force, was a consequence. So that was also a very interesting time to try to do some of those things on campus.

At the same time, there was this terrible need to get the broad range of use of computers ___ the Forest Service for the reasons I was just describing. They had put their own , paid the money, and

The research was done jointly by the Forestry Entomology Department mostly, part of the Forestry Department, and the Forest Service.

*Pacific Southwest. PSW.

Thank you. Branch, OK? Where Bedard and CJ worked and a couple of others and Ed Waters too, eventually. That was both the political setting and what was going on. Sometimes it was very hard to get any ___ because you find ___ being dissipated in political battles.

*Yeah, I didn’t know. I only heard about it once in a while.

You protected me. You and Dave protected me.

But I think, at this point with a full professorship, with for the first time the responsibility to the department to actually __ with each other ___ and do actual useful work together.

*Uh huh.

Turned out to be quite a trick within a university, to slowly find changing _, slowly. And by then you __ what was going. That’s why I could feed you some of this information and it could make a little more sense to you because of your current situation.

It turned out that probably at that point in time, ___ APL was quite a remarkable tool to be added to what it could do. Especially when you look at some of the other garbage that they were taking on at other universities, the 6400 up on campus on the hill. At least even on that one they gave me a box into the computer with a teletype and a little box that talked directly to a phone line. At least I could go into the guts of that without having to __ all the other junk. It cuts way back on getting some of the programs up and going. ___ and debugged ___ for, and get a first cut going. By the time that I through to the Cyber, or the 91, I had coded it so ran pretty well because those are expensive machines.

You don’t screw around with that and not know what you’re doing.

*I did.

That’s not true. You did but you did it in a very intelligent way.

You didn’t really, not by the time it got to the Cyber 7600 and the IBM 360/91. both of those machines were a long way from your Varian with this paper tape. So you can’t recall just screwing around on those either.

You ___ Varians and other things like that. It meant that by the time you messed around, it was a good idea to know what you wanted to do, what you wanted to accomplish, and how you would go about it in some reasonable way. Boy, could you burn up a lot of money fast, down the tubes.

*And a lot of trees too. A lot of paper.

Oh yeah. The high-speed line printers really crank out that so fast.

*Yeah, I remember getting stacks of paper that were 4 inches thick sometimes. Cor___.

*You wrote the basic plot routine and then I adapted it somewhat and got it to work and did the calculations. The first time I did it, I made a mistake and all the numbers came out as zeros. I remember at this time, I would go up to Lawrence Berkeley Lab with a deck of cards. I would wait in line with a deck of cards for about 20 minutes. You get up there to the machine and if one of the card jams, forget it. You have to get out of line, fix it and go to the end of the line.

*I finally get it through and it was taking forever. They came out and said, “Who’s the guy with this job?” They were really upset. They took me in the back room to this Calcomp plotter. Now these were steel drums which are about 6 inches in diameter and about 12 inches long. Steel drums, they were precision drums. It was going back to the origin and then going to the center, going back to the origin, and back to the center. At this time you couldn’t really preview your calculation. It plotted thousands of X’s. It wasn’t just a point, it was an X; it had to go swish. Did that a thousand times. They said, “How many of these are coming out?” I was rather embarrassed.

-Did you tell them that’s what you wanted?

*It wasn’t easy to cancel it either, and there were too much ___.

___ systems are very, certainly the people that were ___ off the wall ___.

*They had a couple cool people up there in building 50. There was a guy named Richard Friedman who was really neat.

+I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that.

That was the old ___ right at the switch with 76.

*Well it starts with 66 and then to the 76. There was a CDC 6600 up there and then they got the 76.

Yeah, it was the 76 we were using for most of our work.

+When was that?

*Probably 72 when I was doing that.

-You were just a baby.

*No, I was about 19.

7.1.12 PDP Machines

+I mean we were running on what? VAX.

*This is pre-VAX.

+No, it wasn’t quite. It was CDC but I can remember going onto the computer network up at Berkeley when we were running on VAX servers.

Yeah, Maxine was there and this guy by the PDP 11 or 12, 11.

+It was 11.

*Considered a toy.

+Toy? Paperweight now.

*They were considered a toy at that time.

Realize at this time we were using both the CDC machines and some of the original Unix machines that were PDP 11/45s running I think it was Version 5 Unix. Maybe it was Version 6. This was like before Version 7, which preceded System 5.

*Version 3 or 4 actually. No actually you’re right, it was probably 5.

No, it was before System 5, before they went to the system designations. There was a Version 7 which was released. We were running Version 6.

*Yeah, the Stat department had Version 6 as well.

Berkeley was running 50 users simultaneously on a PDP 11/45 and everybody was happy with it. We thought it was really hot stuff when we got 300 baud direct lines to it. We were paying I don’t know $.75 or a buck an hour connect time.

*Yeah, it was a lot of money.

7.1.12.1 Microcomputers & Silicon Valley

Micros in Stinson Beach

    5: Kim, Carver Mead, Don Lancaster

    4: microscopes at Bolinas School

17. Stinson Beach stinson.1-7

    Micros        stinson.1
    
    UC Irvine        stinson.4
    
    Carver Mead        stinson.4
    
    Kim Computer        stinson.5

So here are all these various women who are truly remarkable and they also have been very, very important in my life.

stinson (copied over)

They’re in Stinson Beach. It was really nice that Hilary __ microscope __ lends credence to the __ valuable in terms, she’s not using that __ any more and I’m just really glad to see that microscope goes out to building a school.

I hadn’t mentioned even Nancy, such as a brief aside, ___ rework her stereo microscopes for the school down there when they, I ___ not directly in a fire but a building in where they had some other problems and there had been damage and all, so I needed to refurbish ___ stereo microscopes at. But hmm.

Nancy Sullivan ended up as principal and overall organizer of the entire Bolinas School System and she was superbly good teacher, superbly good organizer, superbly good at everything the kids needed together and created her own learning environment and it was wonderful.

*When did you first go to Stinson Beach?

When we were trying to get through the last of graduate school and the grandmother had the place there.

Oh the thing that photographer who was a woman who lived in San Francisco. She was related to Hilary.

Imogene Cunningham.

*I didn’t know she was related to Hillary.

And then Hillary ___ was a more of a conventional homemaker but a very, very remarkable, intelligent, beautiful person and that her daughter Hillary was just an incredibly beautiful, intelligent, coordinated ___ type of woman and she just grew up that way all the way along

Yeah. They’re related, so it was a chance, if you have one ___ family pioneering woman, pioneer worked in another branch, pioneering work and just a second, I’ll sit down. Sopping wet. It’s cold and have sweats on but boy have I been sweating. I’m almost sure that Imogene Cunningham __ lady because they came by to take Hillary’s picture one time. So my photographer, pioneer person, in visual education using movies to educate children before movies ___, like I say pioneer both black and white and color into school.

It was such a remarkable place to go visit. There were people __ like Nancy Sullivan and her daughter were ___ things like that too at the time. It was interesting ___ and it was interesting, really nice interaction with them. Robin used to just take off and go climbing out.

Up in the mountains with ___ for example. It was fun as well as, ___ funny joy across the whole family because ___ many times. Also they had some friends from the paper both women friends and men friends that were gay and they would call ___ because Nancy had no feeling whether you’re gay. That was their business. One of the fellows ___ and stayed at his house one time because she needed a place to stay. ___ moved in with him, freaked out over his gay men friends because she carried the joke all the way. She carried the joke all the way. These gay friends had the most outrageous sense of humor. I have never laughed so hard in my entire life. A couple of the men, gay friends, had the most truly outrageous sense of humor. I used to laugh until I thought I’d die because I couldn’t get a breath any more and it was neat.

Hillary used to pick up on it because we were sort of friends and we’d trade people and places and information. One time she needed to stay in the city for a while. He offered her his place and ___ that she, he moved in with his gay friends. She had moved in with him ___ There was this just totally beautiful, fascinating, incredibly talented woman moving into this gay man’s apartment, and she carried it off absolutely perfectly.

*I can imagine.

She had this ability, well ___ Kennedy until he had ___ literally coming out of his ears teasing him. Carmen leaped into the things that Hillary was able to do. But this other thing, she could pull off in a way which was mindboggling. She never missed a beat in doing it either. She ___ from absolutely ___ incredibly sophisticated and funny and outrageous all at the same time, and carried it off. Never dropped the ball, never. Just was able to do it. I remember there were other times like she was wearing the, at the time ___ what I’m describing, doing the sunrise in the Berkeley way. The People’s Park riots got serious, very serious and they were killing people. It was a very interesting time __ to be in these kind of things.

You asked me why I went there. I was ____ I went there because ___ by surprise but . They had a whole group of other people that almost . They got paid for it but ___ because they loved the teaching. What was the fellow’s name that used to teach in the grammar school, Bolinas I think it was.

*Oh, Lank? I saw him last spring.

There were people like that that also that I thought were . But the list .

I just have to say it again because what you’ve done is ask me to say something about Stinson Beach, which I totally ___ about whatsoever, and something about Hillary which I absolutely would think , but I mean saying it, I’ve got to be brutally honest . It’s my life, and I certainly was attracted to the talent and beauty of Hillary’s mother. She was a lovely woman, and the talent and beauty of Hillary’s Virginia Cunningham, grandmother. And I really thought the ___ Imogene Cunningham ___ me. So here I was ___ family in many, many ways with the idea that this would be a place where I’d be having children, this is the place where I would be doing all sorts of ___ ecologically-oriented things and family-oriented things.

Bill Sullivan

*What about Bill Sullivan? You had a special relationship with Bill. He told me that he learned a lot from you about how to live.

We overlapped in a number of areas because he was, you see I at that time the whole micro electronics world was reaching the point, the threshold point, where you ___ do something in macro electronics, from being a game only for hardware people you could actually ___ to compilers onto microprocessing, so he got very intrigued with the stuff I was doing there. He also loved rock music, he also loved loud rock music and that was my big entertainment and what was it? The Doors. Light My Fire. Is that right?

*Yeah.

The Doors and Light My Fire. It went on and on and on and I had a hi-fi . We used to shut the doors so we wouldn’t disturb the neighbors so much. We’d crank up the bass all the way and on the side ___ about an inch in and out from what we were playing of the Doors’ Light My Fire. And that was kind of fun. So you know, one moment we were doing one thing like that, and another thing is I ___ because it was good for you, so I was taking running or walking or hiking, fooling around the beach, whatever, as much as I could because I thought the people tended to live a sedentary life and it wasn’t good for you. So I encouraged them to try to exercise as much as they could. Whatever fit, you know, especially in things where you’re out in the open air, hiking, walking, running, you know, it’s great for you and you should do it as much as you could.

I was always encouraging ___ so it was multidimensional, multidimensional. And later on, you see, he got involved in say Cobol software and the management of it on microprocessors and ___ computers and got in a whole company type thing for a while, you know, but it was hilarious ___ from one day to the next. We thought ___ for a while, and so it went.

*Now he’s doing authentic reproductions of World War II outfits. Have you seen the catalog that he has?

No.

*He has authentic reproduction of barber jackets and hats and he’s working on cowboys. In fact right now he’s visiting a cowboy in Oklahoma and I imagine he’s going to develop a whole new line of clothing that’s authentic reproduction of this guy’s outfits.

That’s intriguing, really intriguing ___. Nice to hear.

*But my impression is that you inspired him to really open up his mind and entertain lots of new possibilities about what he could do.

Yeah ___ tend to be very strict, and he was part of a ___ crew that kept Russia in its place but ___ much more person I saw ___ but it’s other ___ people that do this. I’m sure not going to. But also it meant that he traveled all over the, on one hand he traveled all over the world including Japan and ___ double languages to Japan, and finally as I understand it, he married a Japanese wife. A great looking considering.

*Yes, I’ve seen a picture of her. I’ve never met her.

And the thing is that I, it’s, what can I say? His father ___ doubts about his ability. So I tried to undermine that as much as I could. Particularly after the divorce. ___ he was ___ after the divorce, try to help, and it would be fun to encourage him, stretches your mind in multidimensions, stretches mind multidimensions, and it would also relate to basic health too for people should take care of themselves, stay out of drugs which was downer. Be careful you don’t get trapped in even legal drugs like alcohol and smoking because the devastation ___ my own family. Drugs suck, and they screw you up, so I tried to do everything I possibly could to make him not do that.

*Well, it was successful. And continues to be successful.

So that’s a capsule of my ___ it was only after Nancy that I really felt free to do much of anything. Otherwise but after that I figured I would love to help him all I could in positive ways. So my ___ zigs and zags of what I thought was right or proper ___ my business. Sorry. So all I can do is to go my own way, have to teach a little of it by example but nothing else.

*Now, I’m just thinking about the time. It’s about 2:30. Are you getting hungry?

No, not at all yet. I would like to talk just a little bit more.

*Sure, that’s fine.

You see what happened, what time did you say it was?

*2:30.

My goodness, that’s early. I was sure it must be 5 or 6 or 7 ___.

So I just decided at that point I couldn’t find any ___ doesn’t fit any more and at that particular time I had just looked at some other thought that was beginning to happen. Micro-electrics, electronics and microcomputers, and I had already bought myself, just bought myself a Kim, a computer.

*I remember seeing that.

And it ___ one silly board and here was a complete computer that talked to the outside world.

*That was the first.

It had memory, it had a processor, it had a , and even a keyboard to talk with. It even had a simple seven signal display if I remember. It was incredible. So that was I can see where, here I read the stuff. Let me get one book that is important to me. __ fragmentarian . too much because what happens is I find that it will also, it will distort my ideas ___ what happened. So what I tried to do this time for the stuff that you’re recording now is not read any books, and do it strictly on the first cut from memory, from memory, do everything from memory only, and the key to, you see ___ when you say, you know, I passed by this way but I didn’t save any of it, to this point in my life. But, have you ever read this book ___?

*No.

Carver Mead

Let me make sure __ cuz you see sometimes I’m totally off the wall ___. Have you run into any old Carver Meade’s work there at Caltech?

*Yeah.

He’s very much a person that was very directly influenced by the ___.

Integrated circuit until you read the quantum is switching things that he will look at as a student and then found was not a practical device for the government, so how fast they did switch the __ effect, and but then realized that that was the only real limited scaling on integrated circuits and was very far away, and each of dimension was cut power, increase reliability, to increase speed, dah dah dah. Because you would be moving nearer and nearer, the end __ quantum mechanical was ___ the underlying crystals and the physical __ were the physical ___ . You can’t scale that down much without running into all sorts of problems. But he was able to show it because of the quantum mechanics you got all these incredibly interesting and increasing so that was the reason for the other piece. You see that piece? And then he published some stuff in a ___ thing that came down and signed __ American at the time on electronics and Paul issued ___ just electronics, and then we come back at that same time and then also he, I ran across some of his work. He was off to the side, out of the main thing, that most people talked about, but it seemed like there was no, no, they would just keep going and keep going, improve, improve, and faster and faster and faster.

So my first cut on the first real computer that I had on the Kim which was and since so much of my life had been tied to the limits of computers and to computer graphics. This was a real joke cuz it all turned out to be an almost ___ mathematical piece of computer science turned out to be computer graphics. It’s the way it is now, __ possible to build computers that can just begin to deal with now it takes a very high and very expensive computer to begin to get 3-D and color and animation and things like that. I think you have to go to the _ super computers of today that do much of your animation say for a big movie or something like that.

But because of this and because every pathway they’ve now seen, found ways of ___ the first transistors I ever used ___ were , you know, they later became to silicon, there were the silicone ones that _ make into integrated circuits because __ all the things into a plane. All the components that you need, to build real electronic circuits, but the thing was the fact it all of a sudden what they found is that if you make it ___ of silicone gallium you can move to a whole new range of things, of increasing speed and decreasing ___ without any problems ___ just getting to the end of what they’d ___ but by going to the silicone gallium all the way ___ up again, and of course I already mentioned that the IBM wanted to buy replacing aluminum with copper lines. There was another whole drop in power and increase and so on. So it just goes on __ from underneath everything else is ___ but also , but it’s not going to stop either. For one. And Culver Meade probably was right on the take it clear down to being able to ___ final limitation.

But by that time 3-D anyway in place. Anyway, life goes and goes and goes. So it was also those kinds of twists and turns to things, it was also the stuff that what I did find was that it, what is it I want to say? How can I say it? You see when I took that __ Kim, I also had been using. Hobby, OK?

*I didn’t have this on. So you had, you started a company called Micrographics, Graphics on the Kim, and Don Lancaster came out with this book, The Incredible…

Well, what had happened before, much before that book, much before that book, he came out with a series of books in the Sand Series that had made it so you could build a terminal inexpensively from hardware that was available at that time. TTL, small scale integrated TTL type of things. It took hardware, it took a lot of time and a lot of effort, so what had happened is he also had discovered the Kim at the same time and he thought I am absolutely blown away. Here is a complete computer. I mean I can program the , I can even program it to throw letters up on a screen and I can even have it do graphics because I got a screen just one bit deep. And fast enough to get through a complete sweep of the screen. So instead of all this incredibly complex hardware, he came out with a cheap video, it was called a cheap video something or other. It was based on the Kim. This I showing you older books of ___.

*I’m looking at.

There was a cheap video thing. Then after that he came out with an even cheaper one that was all totally software based, ___ off the Kim. And then you could feed the output from that, just a simple with just a few interface circuits and that was it. And you had a replaced all this incredibly complex and unreliable hardware that was hard to work with, with a Kim and some software. That was the point that just blew my mind, because at the same time had already come out with algorithms for straight lines that were elegant. You could prove but you couldn’t write the straight line any better and you should see all the hardware implementation of straight lines called DBAs, digital analyzers.

Or people would take their crack at drawing a straight line based on the math that they knew from college. The circuits at the time were also drawing, ___ functions. You call the ___ functions and make a circle and then you broke it down into small line segments so your ___ or DBAs with . The small line segments, and you could line segments ___ circles and curves and stuff. So here __ comes along and he proves this algorithm that only just uses simple addition, simple integer addition and subtraction to, and __ division by two to draw the line, and ___ shifts one position, incredibly fast operation. Now if you want to draw a ___ shift, it __ incredibly , one very fast.

But at the same time I was leaving he came out with a circle___ that is nothing but an __ version that made an exact perfect circle ___ integer addition, integer subtraction, and shift. One ___ and I got that up and running on the Kim using Donald ___ faster than a super computer could do it. Faster than a 91 could do it, certainly an APL, but faster than, I could do it in APL, I could do it in assembly language ___ Cyber 76. Mindboggling. Cuz you see I was having to do all the ___ stuff . I had to do slowest of all the calculations ___ exponentials. And trying to ___ those damn things together and then you got hit by all this ___ you didn’t how the machine was going to ___ the next time . Here right directly in the wrong . Man I was so much faster with my silly Kim and and a perfect straight line with the ideal math for both ___ than the super computer could do. It blew me away. So that’s what I got running there for, I had formed the company MicroGraphics ___ micro computers, applications for computer graphics.

I couldn’t find any work , I had no degree that actually, other than the undergraduate one I had finished in biology, no one had any interest in anything to do with ecology and there seemed to be a back reaction against things that weren’t environmentally oriented or easier I couldn’t find any work or anybody doing any integrated type control things that I had __ for what 6 years. Yeah, 6 years. ___ for 6 years too.

*Yeah. Better than I got as a graduate student.

That’s how that went. Then I went out to the center of the universe for silicon devices in microelectronics so . I lived there for many years afterwards and I moved there right on the again so it would have been.

*It was about 76 or 77?

No, that was when I did all the micrographic stuff, got all the algorithms up and running, and got all this Kim stuff done and used his ideas to . I need to be re because if some people like the ___ I wouldn’t have gone anywhere if he hadn’t done his work and Carver Mead hadn’t done his work. ___ and Carver Mead were the two people I absolutely ___ to do any computer graphics with the micrographic approach, together with ___ original Kim ___.

I found myself faced with the fact that somehow ___ and also what I had done, I had worked for the university for years and years and years and I had paid them for all sorts of, not only the health plan, the HMO type health thing, which was so good I, even as poor as I was, I kept those going. Years later I still had the HMO from Kaiser ___.

I had this incredible size of annuity that accumulated because I had been paying it ever since I ___ first a programmer way back in 61, 62 when I was first doing programming and other course work at UC-Riverside. I got all that money and I got paid by other people doing yard work and things like that, and the things that ___.

That’s when I was living right next door to Nancy. Hillary found this place, ___ Cunningham, and with Nancy there too. It was this very nice place and I really, it was a beautiful place. That’s where I did all the original ___ programming __ first got everything up running for the company MicroGraphics. At that point I totally ran out my money resources and every other good thing.

*OK, so that covers that. Now one thing that you brought up in January was about the work you did in the early 80s on microprocessor-driven graphics.

Well, I’m going to have it be my whole life before you. Every last fragment, huh?

*That’s right.

Actually that was another interesting time beside the space program. The integrated control stuff was the first effort to treat pest management in a more rational way was another. And then it was just a bear how much things cost if they were graphics oriented.

UC Irvine

Kent Bridges was one of the other graduate students. We were the two mathematically biological programming oriented people in the department when we were getting our doctorates there at UC-Irvine. He was running some small sample tests and seeing how bizarre the behavior. Whitaker came years later.

Kent Bridges was using an IBM, I guess it was an IBM 360, no it was an IBM 9097 pops in my head. It was the one that was just one niche behind. They were trying to make a machine that could be used for weather forecasting before their 91 came out.

Kent was using specialized output devices that had been designed for computer graphics, IBM brand, from their super computer. He was doing simple leaf outline and they banned him to doing it at 2 a.m. in the morning. It took the super computer to its knees to do any computer graphics. I guess you had your little experience with the other branch of super computers up there at LBL where you weren’t very popular either for a while.

*That’s true. [I nearly broker LBL’s high precision drum-based printer. I sent it picture after picture that plotted 1000 “X”s in the middle of a page. All zeros. Oops.

Silicon Valley / Carver Mead

Everywhere I looked I saw super computers, just mind bogglingly expensive to use and the computer graphics were just out of sight in the cost. Even military, for the most demeaning jobs to deal with computer graphics of that time. So what I had done is I had also been , it had been going on with microelectronics and I had also been following, I can’t think of his name right now. He was the other person that was student and associated with Feynman there at Cal Tech.

No, he was the person that his original, his dissertation was there and I think it was partly under Feynman. His dissertation work was high speed switching devices using tunnel diode effect, and it turned out that there was no practical, in spite of it switching very very fast and very very __ there was no practical way to scale __ real devices in the real world. So even though the person that was, that had discovered that tunnel diode switching effect was given a Nobel Prize and never __ to any practical devices in the real world. But a very interesting thing happened was, like losing a family name. It just blows my mind. His name won’t come.

*You’re not thinking of Carver Mead?

Thank you. Carver Mead. His name wouldn’t come. Carver Mead. So what happened was that he looked at this and he said that __ is the only real theoretical __ in what you can do in circuit subdivision, and yet if you have the circuit size . I can’t remember any more but I think you end up with a quarter, you end up with half the voltage, a quarter of the power much less more functionally on a of that of real __ much more a chip with much more power.

Nobody else really believed him. Nobody believed him. Just thought he was one of the totally off-the-wall crazies from Caltech. So anyway because of Carver Mead’s, knowing him by way of Feynman and the close link of course some of the people __ great people. I just figured he was another person that called it right again. But this whole company and a whole future like Carver Mead getting it right. This would have been the thing.

The very very last, he was crazy, very last of the program for the integrated circuit, I mean for, what am I saying? For integrated control type of __ was integrated __ everything. For integrated control was actually the stuff I was helping with there at UC-Berkeley. When I looked around the rest of the country, nobody else was doing anything at all.

When those lines __ back reaction at that time to the direction __ of the end of it in the 60s and the beginning of the 70s that put all that stuff in place about the environment people. A professor, even if he’s a full professor, should even talk to students. He should be judged on the basis of some teaching ability too. How radical. So that all got thrown in place in that crazy time at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s and really the last fragment of that was when the pieces of the integrated control stuff at the end would have been 78? Yeah, 78, OK. Sometimes I lose decades.

78 was the time that I’ve always described that Carver Mead had laid the stuff in place. It seemed that it __ just by down scaling. Downscaling would just come faster, more reliable. The literature review comes closer to the underlying crystal structure which means that all the pieces and more like a quantum mechanical device and the more you use it, become more quantum mechan, you know __ device __ by man was quantum theory of course, by far. Just mind boggling . So if downscaling really structure of the quantum mechanical stuff, then the only real __ effect. You find you couldn’t make things all small and so thin that you’d get punching through __ say an electron figuring not being, figure out where it was and popping into the other field because of quantum mechanic probability.

So anyway Carver Mead was throwing out all this neat stuff. And of course I was right sort of smack in the middle of feeling really happy about the work that he had done and believing him. All the industry pundits said 2 or 3 more downscaling and you’re going to be approaching the __ of life. It was almost like they were going to tell you you’re never going to fly faster than the speed of light. What, you’re never going to downsize beyond your optical dimensions __ have a couple of __ going to be able to do anyway.

Then you have another __ they just were, didn’t see any possible use of those kind of speeds or complexity. What in the world would you do with that? Not a speed because they couldn’t __ to anything. So that was about the time I also had bought myself a Kim from MOS Technology and technology of the 6502 belonged to Kim. This was long before the Apple came out, ages before the Apple came out based on the same microprocessor.

*This was that kit?

Yeah, that little kit.

*I remember that. I remember seeing that in your living room.

Yeah. Or even before that I had it over at Stinson Beach and I was laying out the first of the design work. But actually what happened is, now his name won’t come out of my head. He was the fellow that wrote the incredible secret money machine, Don Lancaster. Don Lancaster, OK? He was the one that really set up all the technology so that you could really use it. He was __ simplifying, make available __ the Sand Series that, it would make it so __ without being __ you could get electronics up and running.

And then he found the Kim and the Kim just blew him away because it was both really __ software and hardware and design. But he came out with how you could build a video system based on a Kim to __ just a black and white __ which was all I needed. I just needed black and white to get the __ up and running and because you would write to memory, you’re relieved with the processor cycles so half the cycle on the Kim, on the 6502 would be devoted to hardware and the other half could be devoted to __ for modification.

He put a simple cover in, just to control the display. He could do the entire display __ and it was fast enough for, an 80 by 80 D, what is that an 80 by something. It seems if I had 80 dots across the thing. That’s a lot of dots, and I was able to actually see them. It was mind blowing over at Stinson Beach. What I did is I set up some propriety as I said of macrobiotics, and I set it up in my own name and what’s the county that is the one that hooks around the Bay.

*Marin County?

No. Marin County was.

*San Mateo in the south? Or are you talking north Bay?

The Bay where it was that John, I remember John Muir had his place where his ranch was. __ Ranch.

*Well there’s Contra Costa County.

Yeah. I’m almost sure it was Contra Costa County. Doesn’t that have a hook around the back side?

*Yeah.

It was a long __ drive to set up all of my stuff, but I set up a sole proprietorship. I used the last of my retirement money from the university and the last of my unemployment. I actually worked part-time over at Stinson Beach for Virginia Cunningham putting up electronics stuff, and doing gardening for people.

But I surely was interested enough, it was a __ but I got off and running. I actually __ was running faster than the super computers that I had been doing. I was not only able to do __ algorithm but I was able to do a perfect circle algorithm. He had devised a way that only required an integer addition, integer subtraction, and a shift, a one position shift. Well, the fastest operations of the CC__. It wasn’t a ten position shift, it was a one position shift. That’s all that was required, so I was able to come up with a circular that run much faster and more than the ones in the super computer.

So I __ other mathematicians along the way that I have not, surprised that they need the tools to remain able to do work and just not being able to do it raw, and some of __ incredible. Beautifully done it was, and how beautifully it adapted to that type of __.

The next thing that happened about that time was I also got, it turned out that I tried to buy actually an Apple computer just to do my __ or two development system on. I found that as soon as I dug beyond the first layer of that machine wasn’t super deluxe, was __ a trade-off that I have ever seen in my whole life. That thing ran color sort of. It ran a floppy drive sort of. What it was is designed drive and it ran color and a little system for printing, but the way it got color was it assumed that the color what you would only get it up to basic. Color basic, which was also built directly. The basic was built __ so if you had additional hooks if you needed them and you just can’t believe what a mess that was. But boy did he __ on that silly machine. And some truly elegant __ was quite an engineer when it came to doing that kind of hardware. But I mean there was worse machines that I developed basic mathematics __ on.

So the Kim system gave me, showed me what could be done. It was a really simple system as it was evidently designed and also had all the IO. It had a serial port, it had a parallel port, it had a color, it had standard memory so you didn’t have to worry about __ recessing memory, all neat stuff. It was a complete computer in its own right. Totally complete computer. It had IO clock, everything, central processing unit, the 6502. Rockwell International, talk about , Rockwell International was another MOS Technology and it was, MOS Technology was totally bought out by a company that then became what?

*Motorola?

No, it was just a small intermediate sized company that had bought the rights to MOS Technology. In the course completely __ design people that were doing the . worked on that design as a result. It also was a 6502 . What happened is right at that time there was another company, an engineer, who thought that _ geodesic domes and all that kind of stuff, and environment, were truly neat. He was an engineer, but he also thought that design that had been developed by MOS Technology just shouldn’t die so he also bought the rights.