“Computers will control your life one day,” he said. “Better if you learn how to control them first.”
We wound up with a dense jumble of colored wires arcing between holes on the control board. My father sent us to bed with his thanks. That next evening he told us our control panel had worked perfectly and had caused the 407 to do exactly what he needed, though I imagine we’d left him with much to rewire.
Fifteen years later, I was the only Black systems engineer in my class at IBM’s New York Education Center for a lecture on the history of programmable machines. After presentations on the punch card programmable Jacquard loom of the early 1800s and the wizardry of Herman Hollerith in the 1900s, an older IBM employee stepped to the lectern, holding a model 407 control board. Like a long-forgotten photograph, the sight of that board opened a floodgate of memories.
“Anyone know what this is?” he asked.
Only I raised my hand. “It’s an IBM 407 control board.”
He nodded with surprise and then held up a patch cord.
“How was this used?”
Again, my hand shot up. “It’s a patch cord used to connect two different hubs on the control board.”
If my answer seemed matter-of-fact, his rapid-fire questions surprised me. He shook a fully wired control board in my direction.
“And this?”
“It’s a program, a hardwired program used to control the operation of the 407.”
“I suppose you’ve programmed a 407 as well?”
“I have.”
A “gotcha” expression flashed across his face. “The 407 was introduced twenty years ago. You’re only twenty now. So how could you have programmed a 407?”
After I explained my father’s job and those evenings at the kitchen table, the instructor conceded checkmate. At the time, I may have been the only Black systems engineer in my class, but I was far from the only Black systems engineer in the company. In the generation since my father, more Blacks had entered IBM, some thanks to him. I found it easy to stand up to this instructor. But I also understood that my father had struggled far more in establishing his credibility in an IBM classroom.
My father’s IBM report card shows he began his education on the model 407 in late 1952 and completed the class, with honors, in early 1953. Here is where he encountered the wonders of this modern machine and the wrath of colleagues convinced that a Black man should not be among them.
In these early years of computing, few understood how to tame an electromechanical behemoth like the model 407, and even fewer understood how to teach that skill. Peter Hauptmann, an immigrant from Germany, was that rare individual who instructed others on the arcane art of programming an IBM 407. Hauptmann, who worked at Columbia University’s Watson Research Laboratories, filled classes with students from around the world who came to sit at the feet of a master. He also taught internal classes for IBM employees, like the class my father completed.
Hauptmann may well have been one of the first nerds. In his late twenties, he had a boyish face and dressed in a slightly crumpled dark suit. A tie uneven and just off-center. Wire-rimmed glasses. A cleft chin jutting out. Dark hair slicked back. Photographs from that period show Hauptmann in front of a blackboard stenciled with what appears to be several cribbage boards drawn side by side. An IBM 407—five feet wide, four feet tall, and three feet deep—stands to one side of Hauptmann. Punch cards are stacked in a hopper on the left side of the machine. The truncated top of a typewriter sits in the middle. From a door at the far right, a large handle protrudes.
The model 402 had preceded the model 407, and before the 402 had come the model 405. 405, 402, 407. A joke circulated that a company that produced counting machines could not itself count sequentially. One can imagine how this naming sequence might have rubbed the sensibilities of an engineer like Hauptmann the wrong way, and how he might have attempted to tell this joke as an icebreaker, only to have it fall horribly flat.
Less than twenty years after my father entered his first computing class at IBM, I entered mine, fortunate that men like Hauptmann still taught. I heard essentially the same message my father had, though refined by years of classroom instruction; it began with the systems engineer’s mantra, “Input. Processing. Output.”
Hauptmann would have touched the left, center, and right of the 407 as he delivered that slogan. That’s how a 407 was designed: an input section read data from punch cards, an output section printed numbers and words on a typewriter converted to a printer, and a processing section performed additions.
“Input. Processing. Output,” my father intoned countless times over the years. “These are the basic stages of any computer.”
Sitting in class, my father would have seen Hauptmann move to the right side of the 407 and grab the large handle to pull the door down and open, revealing a control board with many holes and a dense patchwork of colored cords: the same board stenciled on the blackboard behind him. I can imagine the drama as Hauptmann popped out the board, held it overhead, and waved it in front of the class, as many of my IBM instructors did. Systems engineers like my father became intimately familiar with plugboards, as these control boards were also known, and with the colored patch cords connecting the sockets, or hubs, on them.
No doubt Hauptmann used the word program to describe a completely wired control board, for that was the original meaning of the computer term. And while the 407 could execute only one program at a time, it was possible to have multiple control panels wired and ready. Instead of writing results to a printer, each intermediate program would punch its results to a new card deck. A new control panel would then be inserted, and a new card deck would be read, as many times as necessary, until the final program sent its results to the printer.
My father used the knowledge Hauptmann imparted to do his job, to design and wire programs to meet IBM’s customer needs. After a day’s class, his colleagues would often gather over dinner without inviting him. He would sometimes visit with Lena Rogers.
* * *
I never visited Lena’s apartment, but apparently my father often did. I have only vague recollections of hearing that she lived in a studio, perhaps within a hotel, on Manhattan’s West Side with an impressive view of Central Park.
I have no doubt that my father and Lena were drinking and smoking buddies. I smelled booze and tobacco on her breath whenever I was in her presence, and on his when he returned from seeing her. I believe they were probably more. I also believe that my father unburdened himself with Lena in ways he could not with my mother, much like the other men that Lena entertained.
Perhaps it was from pride or shame that, after a few drinks with Lena, my father opened up about his difficulties in class. How when Hauptmann stopped drawing colored chalk lines representing patch cords on the blackboard and began handing out real patch cords and real control boards, suddenly there were not enough supplies for my father. How when my father raised his hand for a question, Hauptmann often never got around to calling on him. And how when it came time to step up to the classroom’s 407 for a demonstration, my father found himself at the back of the line, farthest away from the machine.
I have also long wondered how my father rationalized this friendship, or affair, with a woman who seems in hindsight to have been a high-end call girl. For all of his mastery of deception, my father was also a creature of habit. His preferred parry when I brought up Lena was to shift to a wartime story, one that I suspect he also told her.
“For almost a year, I was a quartermaster for the Army Air Corps, the 339th Fighter Group, stationed at an airfield just outside of London,” my father recounted. “I met Winifred McAllister, an English girl who bicycled to the field each day to help care for our wounded airmen. When we had free time, we’d take long walks, talk for hours. She brought me home once, to meet her parents.
“Then one day she didn’t show up at the base. When she didn’t show up the second day, I bicycled into town to find out why. Her mother answered the door and
fell into my arms, sobbing. Winifred had been killed two nights earlier in a German bombing raid.”
My father, who rarely showed his feelings, would pause, his voice choked with emotion. But to be honest, he was also a master of manufacturing emotions on cue, so it was hard to know whether, after so many retellings, he had choked up for real or simply felt the story required this of him.
“Her mother said to me, ‘Stanley, Winnie told us she’d met a man she was falling in love with, and she didn’t give a damn about the color of his skin. And we didn’t either, just as long as our Winnie was happy.’
“I never got to tell her how I felt about her. Never got to hold her. Never got to kiss her. She was there one day, then she was gone forever the next.”
With Lena, I can also hear my father adding a coda. “So, no, I don’t judge any man, or woman, for needing or finding love and companionship when, where, and how they can. Life is too short.”
* * *
IBM’s classes for systems engineers ended in examinations, usually a practical test of skills rather than a written test to be turned in. Often a class was split into teams that faced off against each other over the challenge of designing the best solution for a hypothetical customer’s needs.
Peter Hauptmann would have designed the final examination for my father’s 407 class. A typical customer problem in those days concerned the production of financial statements from the data a company kept on punch cards. So, for example, Hauptmann would have instructed my father’s class to create a profit-and-loss statement and a balance sheet for a fictitious XYZ company using data he supplied to them on a stack of punch cards.
IBM final exams were rigorous and competitive. Each set of punch cards required its own set of instructions. But the instructions for one set of punch cards would not work with another set, which made such exams rife for sabotage. One team could secretly manipulate the instructions or card deck of another team in order to secure an advantage.
Depending on its size, my father’s class might have been split into two self-selected teams, with a different set of colored punch cards supplied to each. From what I gathered, no team in his class wanted a Black man, which left him with two choices: join a team where he was unwelcomed, or become a team of his own. He chose the latter.
Years later, when my IBM class was given a final exam of creating a balance sheet for a fictitious company, I chose to be a team of one battling for a grade against several teams populated with four or more systems engineers. Each team’s data already lived inside the computer’s memory, but we punched our programs into cards to access and manipulate that data.
I understand what it must have been like for my father to pencil in patch cord connections on a printed sheet of control board templates rather than drawing them on a blackboard diagram because there was no space left for him at the board. And I know what it felt like to need machine time to test his program, when others had occupied all the available slots.
Like my father, I too showed up early for class right before my final exam to grab machine time to test my program in the absence of other students. I dropped the cards containing my program into the computer’s card reader. My father swung open the doors of the 407 and dropped his control board in, then fed the card deck containing his data into the machine’s hopper. My cards zipped into the computer. The 407 consumed his more slowly. Lights blinked on the computer in front of me. Relays clacked and circuits hummed on the 407 in front of him. In both cases, a printer sprang to life, spitting out the results of our labor. And when we tore the pages from the printer, I have to believe we both had the same sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs. Nothing worked!
Here our stories diverge because I do not believe I encountered the same racial animosity that my father did. One of my instructors, a young White man, once stepped in to help me when he could have let me fail. But in telling the story of how he succeeded against the bigotry he faced, my father acted more like a reporter protecting his sources. He refused to name those who’d helped him for fear, I believe, that it might threaten their jobs at IBM. But I also believe a White woman in the education department’s secretarial pool, perhaps a woman he’d secretly flirted with, had typed the instructions for those card decks. That would have been a common practice. Upon recognizing his plight, she may have also interceded at the last minute to provide him with a correct set of instructions, giving him, at least, a fighting chance.
Tommy Barnes knew. Whether it happened behind the closed doors of a classroom or a manager’s office, he knew. Some spoke to Tommy as though it didn’t matter. Others conversed in front of him as though he weren’t there. Tommy, as far as I could determine, was a shrewd but unobtrusive observer who, from decades conducting the public floor to floor, could read volumes behind the slightest change in facial expression, stance, or gait.
Before I stepped into an elevator car, he might whisper, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be okay.”
The seer. The soothsayer. The sage. Most failed to recognize the wisdom, insight, and encouragement available daily. But this lack of recognition never seemed to bother Tommy. He focused on the few of us who’d gladly miss an elevator to hear whatever he had to say, especially the few of us who were Black.
My father would have readily laid down his burdens while riding in Tommy’s car. To which I can hear Tommy reply, “I’ll say a prayer for you, Stan. Miracles happen every day.”
4
The Book of Changes
My mother, Vivian, began practicing yoga in the late 1950s as part of a modern dance class she attended. Few in the West had even heard of yoga at that time. My father would often get confused, telling other people his wife was “doing yogurt,” which I recall bringing about a smirk from those who heard him, followed by a swift rebuke and correction from my mother.
In my twenties, even as I worked for IBM during the day, in the evenings I taught yoga at the Integral Yoga Institute in New York City. Through Integral Yoga, I’d also become a student of Swami Satchidananda, the yoga master from India who’d opened the Woodstock Festival during the summer of 1969. My father viewed these eastern metaphysical practices and teachings as a sharp fall from the grace of his Christian upbringing. He’d long given up on influencing my mother, but he lamented that her actions had also damned my sister, Claudia, and me.
I found this very strange, since modern computing is predicated on the very eastern metaphysics my father eschewed. Digital technology based on binary arithmetic, the computational mathematics of 1s and 0s, can be directly traced back to a three-thousand-year-old Chinese divination system known as the I Ching, or the Book of Changes. The I Ching begins with a question about yourself, your life, or something meaningful to you at the moment. Write that question down. Then toss six coins and randomly arrange them top to bottom. Let heads represent a solid line; and tails, a broken line. You’ll end up with a hexagram of six lines. Now, look up that hexagram in the Book of Changes to determine the answer to your question.
Courtesy of the author
From left to right, the hexagrams shown above in the illustration represent the aspects of Force (qián), Innocence (wú wàng), and Humbling (qiān). The Book of Changes interprets each hexagram with additional commentary. The hexagram representing Force, for instance, is described, in part, in the I Ching as follows:
The power represented by the hexagram is to be interpreted in a dual sense in terms of its action on the universe and of its action on the world of men. In relation to the universe, the hexagram expresses the strong, creative action of the Deity. In relation to the human world, it denotes the creative action of the holy man or sage, of the ruler or leader of men, who through his power awakens and develops their higher nature.1
But if a solid line is assigned the value 1, and a broken line the value 0, the three hexagrams shown in the illustration can also be represented, top to bottom, in binary arithmetic as 111111, 111001, and 000100 (63, 57, and 4 in decimal). With six lines and two possible states fo
r each line, that makes the 26, or 64, hexagrams that form the I Ching. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the seventeenth-century German philosopher and mathematician, the father of calculus, translated the I Ching system of divination into a system of binary arithmetic, the basis of today’s digital technology.
It’s an equally interesting observation that the current IBM logo, designed by Paul Rand in 1972, bears such a striking similarity to three I Ching hexagrams, although with eight lines instead of six, each letter would technically be an octagram.
Courtesy of the author
While this metaphysical backstory is fascinating, it is actually more useful to trace the history of modern-day computing technology back just to 1888, when a German-born engineer named Herman Hollerith won a competitive bid hosted by the US Census Bureau to create a mechanized way to tabulate census results.2
The Census Bureau greatly needed an automated system because it took nearly eight years to complete the 1880 census by hand, leaving little time to prepare for the 1890 census, which, with the nation’s population growth, some feared would not be completed until after the 1900 census had begun. But by 1890, Hollerith’s system was in place. It relied on punch cards to categorize and collect census results, and on punch card readers to tabulate the results from those cards.
Constructed out of heavy paper stock, punch cards have a fixed number of rows and columns where rectangular or circular bits of paper can be punched out, leaving a hole. Punch card machines for sorting, tabulating, and printing “read” these cards by mechanically passing them between brushes and a metal surface. If a brush completes a circuit with the metal, it has passed over a punched-out row and column hole. If a brush does not complete a circuit, then it has passed over a row and column for which no hole has been punched out. Yes or no. On or off. Punched out or not punched out. One or zero. Punch cards and the equipment that reads them operate on the binary logic of 1s and 0s, the same binary logic of computers.
Think Black Page 4