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Computers became part of my life in the mid-sixties. We lived in Nazareth, PA. I
worked for Penn-Dixie Cement and they were expanding the Petoskey, MI plant.
The plant would have a new state of the art control system with a computer for data
logging and raw mix calculations. I was the company liaison with Foxboro, the
control system supplier.
The computer was a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).PDP-5 processor with an
ASR 33 Teletype terminal and IBM electric typewriter data loggers. The computer
was about thirty inches square and six feet tall. It was an eight-bit processor,
booted by toggling a short program in using switches on the front panel that in turn
enabled the Teletype to load a program by reading a paper tape into the memory.
A 2K drum memory was included in the processor enclosure to facilitate the raw mix
calculations.
In the process of learning about the computer I determined that I could have one of
my own for about $24K. But, we could also buy a small two-story home surrounded
by a white picket fence in Nazareth for the same expenditure. The house would
nicely accommodate our family of three, soon to be four (Connie, Francis & I with
Miles on the way.) As it turned out we packed up and moved to Petoskey instead of
buying the house and where I could be closer to the company computer.
Living and working in Petoskey was an experience that neither Connie nor I will ever
forget. Lake effect snow in the winter, Petoskey stone collection along the shore of
Lake Michigan in the summer, and a plant that always seemed to need more of my
time than I had to give were the some of the highlights. The computer was
secondary to my other duties related to electrical and instrument control
troubleshooting and maintenance. However, there was one experience with the
computer that I will always remember – the company President and Board of
Directors visited the plant and I programmed switches on the control panel which
normally logged the status of various single loop controller states to type a
message on the logger acknowledging each of our guests - ‘Welcome Mr. Fred
Doolittle’, ‘Welcome Mr. ----‘, etc.- as they passed by.
