Anecdotes

Anecdote: a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident (source:Merriam-Webster)

There are many untold stories with a PUCC or a Purdue connection. Please use the feedback form to have your stories included. 

The CDC 6500 Lives On

The Control Data Corporation 6500 supercomputer was first installed at Purdue in the fall of 1967. It was finally retired from service in the fall of 1989, providing 22 years of service to the university. Many of us thought that when retired, it was sold for scrap and the system was recycled. It ended up at a computer museum in Chippewa Falls. It was then purchased by the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington, and museum engineers have worked to get parts of it running. See the Living Computer Museum's CDC 6500 site for more information. (Note: The museum has permanently closed as of July 2024 and its contents, including the CDC 6500, slated for auction. Update: The CDC 6500 was sold in September 2024 to an unknown buyer. Hopefully, the work started by the staff at the Living Computer Museum to restore it will continue.)

Dr. Saul Rosen

Dr. Saul Rosen was born in Port Chester, New York on February 8, 1922 to parents George F. and Bertha Semmel Rosen. He completed his BS in 1941 from City College, an MA in 1942 from the University of Cincinnati, and a PhD. in 1950 from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rosen was a giant in the early computing field. He passed away in West Lafayette, Indiana on June 9, 1991 at the age of 69. While my time working under Dr. Rosen was only for a few years, I will remember him for his kindness, and his vision for the Computing Center. His leadership left a long-lasting legacy at Purdue and the computing field. 

Ian Murdock and Debian

The popular Debian Linux distribution was birthed while Ian Murdock was a student at Purdue. In How I came to find Linux from his blog, Ian reflects on the early influences of the PUCC Sequent systems (e.g. sage.cc), and other systems that fueled his interest in the Linux operating system. Preston Smith notes that for his first job was for Purdue Libraries, where Preston worked with Ian and used a Debian desktop/server that Ian set up for him. Sadly, Ian passed away in 2015. 

Gene Kim and Tripwire

Tripwire, a widely-used intrusion detection tool for UNIX systems, was created while Gene Kim was a student at Purdue. Gene spent time working as a PUCC student employee, and writes about it in the post My Work with Tripwire on his web site. He also tells a few interesting stories on the included video, including a shout-out to Kevin Braunsdorf.

Vic Abell and lsof

The lsof command is included in nearly all Unix and Linux distributions, and even Macs. lsof was developed and maintained by Vic Abell during his tenure at PUCC. lsof, originally released in 1994, is used to list the open files on a system, find open files in disk files, named pipes, network sockets, and devices. The use of lsof was even featured on season 2, episode 6 of the Startup TV series. 

The lsof source is distributed through the ftp://lsof.itap.purdue.edu/ site. (Note: This site no longer resolves. The new home is now https://github.com/lsof-org/lsof.)

Dale Talcott and RevRdist

To maintain a standard OS image on the Apple Macs in the campus labs, Dale Talcott developed the RevRdist application while working as a systems programmer for PUCC. Numerous colleges and univiersities adopted RevRdist. RevRdist can be downloaded from the https://www.purdue.edu/revrdist or the ftp://quest.cc.purdue.edu/pub/mac/RevRdist1.6.25.hqx site. (Note: Neither site resolves any longer.)

Gordon Letwin and Microsoft

Former PUCC employee Gordon Letwin was one of the original eleven Microsoft employees. Of many accomplishments, he was the lead architect from Microsoft on the OS/2 project, including work on the HPFS filesystem. 

Ray Boyce and SQL

Dr. Ray Boyce earned his PhD in computer science at Purdue in 1972, and subsequently joined IBM. Dr. Boyce developed the SQL database language along with Don Chamberlin. He is also known for his work developing the Boyce–Codd normal form used in database normalization. Dr. Boyce died tragically in 1974.

Michael Rossman and the Cold Virus

Dr. MIchael Rossman was an early supporter and advocate for the computing facilities at Purdue, and lobbied for the purchase of a CDC Cyber 205 supercomputer for advancements in the field of X-ray crystallography. Among many other accomplishments, Dr. Rossman used the Cyber 205 to help map the common cold virus. Dr. Rossman passed away in 2019, with numerous accomplishments in structural biology 

John Jackson and Amanda Backup

John Jackson provided significant contributions to the development and maintenance of the open-source Amanda Backup application, used to provide backup and recovery services at PUCC. Many students, faculty, and researchers were overjoyed to have a lost file recovered from the system backups.

Nelson Pelton and his dad Art

Nelson Pelton writes, "I grew up going to PUCC Christmas parties in the basement of the MATH building as a young boy.  My most vivid memories are playing “Pie Bill Gates” on my Dad’s (Art Pelton) computer, and being told not to eat the rum balls.  With Christmas just a few days away, I was reminiscing, and stumbled across your page.  Thanks for taking the time to upload photos of my Dad, and any memories you can share of him would be great!"

PUCC Christmas Parties

Adding to Nathan Pelton's comments, the annual Christmas parties were treasured PUCC events. Highlights included the French onion soup (Jeff Schwab) and rum balls (Lon Ahlen), along with an abundance of food, drink, desserts, and conversation provided by the PUCC staff. It was an annual tradition that we looked forward to each holiday season, and provided an opportunity for family members to join the PUCC family for the annual celebration. 

Computer Operators

Up through the early 90's, computer operators were on hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to perform tasks to operate and maintain the various computing systems. These tasks included monitoring and releasing large compute jobs on the CDC systems before the advent of batch scheduling such as PBS, allocating and assigning magnetic tapes for storing and retrieving offline data, and printing and filing printed output into their respective output bins. These roles were affectionately referred to as running the console, hanging tapes, and flippin' and rippin' the printed output.

Ex-Control Data Employees of Australia

The Ex-Control Data Employees of Australia web site contains a lot of historical information about both Control Data Corporation and ETA Systems. There are a number of videos that show various CDC and ETA systems in operation back in the day. 

Dawn or Doom

At the keynote presentation for the 2015 Dawn or Doom conference, Bart Gellman included three slides of classified government information that had been previously leaked. After the "disclosure" of confidential information in the three slides was reported to the university research officer, the recording was deleted. That action caused some pushback on whether or not the university had overreacted by removing the video.

The Morris Worm

After PUCC systems were struck by the Morris sendmail worm in 1988, Kevin Braunsdorf and Rich Kulawiec made an object copy of the code available on a PUCC ftp server for other researchers to review. Based on a request from the NSA, the copy of the code was removed at the direction of the Purdue president. 

Solving Mathematical Conjectures

Professor Louis de Branges, a professor of mathematics, proved out the Bieberbach conjecture using the Cyber 205 supercomputer. The Bieberbach conjecture had challenged mathematicians since it was proposed in 1916, until it was finally solved by Professor de Branges in 1984. It is now known as the De Branges's theorem in honor of Professor de Branges. Professor de Branges came to Purdue in 1962. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1963 to 1966), a Guggenheim Fellow (1967-1968), the author of two mathematical mongraphs, and more than sixty research mathematical journal articles.

Stories from David Bloodgood

David Bloodgood used the Purdue CDC systems during his time as a student, and later worked with a CDC 200 series at TRW. David recalled that a friend was programming for a paid research project (a 3000 series account) during the summer of 1977. Unfortunately, the program had an unexpected infinite loop. When he submitted it via Procsy, the compute job kept disappearing (it was in the queue for another CDC computer). So he ran it again and again, and it disappeared each time. Approximately 20 minutes (1024 seconds) later, the first compute job returned, but with a time limit abort. His subsequent compute jobs also returned the same error. With so many runs and with the error in the program, his friend ended up consuming all of the paid funds on his account, in one day! David said that he learned from this that 1024 seconds is about 17 minutes.

Another friend of David's was frustrated by the time limits / priorities available for student jobs. He needed 12-14 seconds but wanted the priority granted to jobs needing less than 8 seconds. So he "Invented" a new Control card - "ZAP." which aborted the job when it executed. He then used a "PROCEED." card to get the extra 8 seconds that MACE allocated for aborted jobs to "Clean-up". With the extra seconds, he could run his 12-14 second job with the priority of an 8 second job. Early computer hacking indeed.

Remembering the Early Years in Purdue Computer Sciences

The Purdue CS Reunion site contains some fascinating stories and history of the early Computer Science discipline and  the Purdue Science Center from the perspective of several CS grad students. 

Revision Control System (RCS) 

The Revision Control System (RCS), a tool for managing multiple text revisions, is first released in 1982 by Professor Walter F. Tichy during his time as a computer science professor (1980-1985) at Purdue University. From his initial paper abstract, "RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions, and provides access control. It is useful for text that is revised frequently, for example programs and documentation." An excellent history of RCS is "A History of Source Control Systems: SCCS and RCS".

Stories from Jim Holmes

Jim Holmes spent time working on programs in the computer center as a student. While waiting in line to speak to a consultant about a program error, he would often help other students debug their programs while waiting in line. This helped him speed the line along to that he got quicker assistance with his error. In his spare time, Jim uses a CDC mainframe simulator to run programs from that era. If you happen to have a copy of the source code for the circuit analysis programs from the EE department, please drop a line as Jim would appreciate a copy. 

Imitation

If you want to read the same PUCC history that I wrote for this web site, please visit the RCAC History page on the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) web site. Kudos.