Jim Manning
Recollections, 1965 - 1995
I remember when I worked in 1964 for Shulman's furniture. Dick Lesser was just leaving and you (John Rudan) were coming on board and said you wanted to hire me but were not in a position to do so. You said to come in for an interview. I remember coming for an interview and I apologized when I did come because I had jeans on and my hands were dirty as I came from my job. Anyway you hired me and I started at $4000 per year. I remember my first experience when I came on board. You said let's go have a cup of coffee; I screwed up the coffee and it went all over the stock room in Rand Hall. My first task was cleaning up the floor!
I remember there were two guys in the machine room. There were the IBM machines, the 407, the reproducing punch, the sorter, collator and the 101 machine. I started on June 15 and I think it was Dick Granda, one of the operators, who told me I had 15 days (to learn the work) since he was leaving on July 1. There was another tall thin guy with a beard, who was a psychiatrist, I can't remember his name, but he was like a consultant. I remember his face and he was real tall, like 6 feet, 5 inches. I remember the key punch area with Sandy (Pastore) and Bev Reed.
I worked in the IBM machine room for about 6 months or so then I went to work for Dave Pulleyn. He moved me into the Control Data machine room, the Burroughs machine was just leaving, and I worked second shift for about a year. Then we hired Bill Biata. Amos Ziegler was the first shift operator at that time. I remember Dave picked me over Amos to do the billing, etc., and that got Amos ticked off and he left shortly after. That was my first exposure to internal Cornell politics. After Bill came, John Reynolds and then Cliff Longcoy were hired. I remember training Bob Blackmun, Don Greenberg and some of other students who were getting advanced degrees, as operators. I remember working with some outside guy, Dave Kassel, I think who worked for Therm but used our machine and I used to work for him for pay on the weekends.
I remember the merger of Machine Records and the Computing Center and going to Langmuir. Those were the hard days. I remember Conway and going into those Monday morning meetings with these green sheets. At that time the Rand Hall people were turning into the machine operators and those from Day Hall were the Production Controllers and administrators. It was always us against them - Pulleyn Vs Bordonaro. I remember being there the second day and being told I had to run the Payroll on the 1401! Wow!! By this time we had hired Caracillo and he was the only one with IBM experience. The only one. We would work weekends and all kinds of hours. It was crazy. Then every Monday we would go in with those green sheets and fire complaints at each other. Conway would listen to hear the problems. Jay Johnson was there and he didn't like anybody. He didn't like Geno or me a whole lot. They had all these procedures for the 1401 and they were all outdated. Dave, and Geno and I spent all summer working 16 hour days rewriting all this stuff. Jay thought it took too long and he was on everybody's ass to keep moving, keep moving. We got it to work. After Bordonaro left, Jerry Buckland was working for Dave at the time.
In 1968 when we opened Upson I remember Gene and I working all kinds of hours. That was nice because we were non-exempt and we got these nice overtime checks. I remember Dave calling us in on day and saying, "Guess what, you're now exempt staff!" No more overtime. At that time you had to put 5% of your salary into TIAA-CREF. Mandatory. I feel good about that now even though I then had to go find two part time jobs to support my family. There were no machines in Upson to begin with. We only had keypunches and everything was couriered to Langmuir. Mike Mosher, a little guy, would carry all the card trays to Langmuir and back. Cards would be read at Langmuir and then returned and the cards were filed alphabetically by name in card cabinets for retrieval by the users. The Upson "cage" was built when we installed the IBM RJE machines. We had this big high speed printer and the students would just stand and wait for their output. I still remember all the times the system would crash. It would be down for day or half a day or so and poor Mike would have to carry these 30 or so trays to Langmuir and back. He never complained. Then George came along and he complained a lot. Probably the best thing we did was to get the Unitechs so students could load their own cards.
I remember selling batch tickets for a buck. A student would get 5 or so batch tickets from the course instructor for a project. If you needed more you could buy extras from the operator. We had this little cash box and you had to have a buck or 5 bucks to buy tickets as we could not make change. Since there was no way to reconcile the tickets sold with the money received we just trusted our student operators! If a person made just one card mistake the batch card was gone. We had a lot of students crying at the desk that they had just made one mistake. I think some of the operators were pretty lenient at times. Then when the Unitechs came along that took a big load off the operators.
I was still at Langmuir. I moved back to campus and was in Clark for about 6 months. Then I went to Uris. I shared an office with Dave Bessel and worked for him for about a year. Then John Aiken came along and I worked for him for awhile. That's when Uris went totally interactive except a few keypunches so that the building occupants could punch their cards there and quit complaining. I remember Bud English, the building manager. He claimed we were like cancer spreading around all over the place. We started with one room and kept moving and expanding and ended up with most of the ground floor and some space on the 4th floor.
The incident that I remember about Bob Blackmun when he was working on his masters degree. He had his program deck in a tray on a cart and as he was wheeling it up the ramp in Rand Hall the door closed and cart slipped backwards and hit the door and knocked the tray off the cart and spilled the cards all over the floor! Luckily he had the deck numbered so we took it to the sorter and sorted the cards into sequence! He panicked for awhile but it ended OK. I remember Cardman took his place.
The best experiences I had were with the student operators. We started with students back in 1968. They started as dispatchers and then became operators. One guy's name I still remember is Mike Begun, my first hire. I wish now I had pictures of all the operators we've had over the years so I could track where they are now, what they've done, etc. A lot of the student supervisors I've had since 1989 stay in touch, They stop in and see me.
Things stayed on an even keel until Doug Van Houweling came on board. He was a mover and shaker. I reported to Doug and then Steve Worona came in and I worked with him for awhile. Steve was the Assistant Director when OCS merged with CAG. I remember the power play with Doug and Blackmun - they went at each other tooth and nail. Then I remember King coming in. I can't remember who I was working for when King came in but up until that time we always worried about money and money. We had a meeting with him one day, we put facilities in Clara Dixon and another in Carpenter, like about 3 labs in total, and we had started to put one in McFadden. Someone said it would cost $100,000 and he said, "Do it"!
I remember the first batch of students I hired back in 1969. I used to come in on Saturday mornings. Dan Bartholomew used to be around and we always had a pot of coffee going. We had this black guy, Tom Jones. He worked for me and he was terrific. He was my Saturday morning operator. I'll never forget when the blacks took over Willard Straight, he was the first guy out of the place and in the front in the well known picture of that event. I told this story at my 30th anniversary luncheon and said that's how I picked them. Now look at how successful he's been getting to be President of TIAA-CREF.
The thing I'm most proud of is starting the student operator supervisors, STOS. Student operators never had a career path. If you were an operator you would get a dime more per hour per year and that was about it. Then I hired Sharon Sledge, in the mid-80s, and she was the second shift supervisor. We had to make some budget cuts and we re-organized. Chris Jones went somewhere and Gene Holleran went somewhere else. I was talking to someone from Dining Services and he said they had student supervisors, supervising other students. I talked to King, he liked it, and costed it all out and he said - go ahead. It cost about half of what we were paying a full-time person. It's been going since the mid-80s and has been very successful. We now have between 85 and 90 operators. We started at about 20 to 30 and got to over 100 at one time. We used to do a lot of double coverage but budgets have been shrinking and we've been cutting back. When we started Upson and Clark were 24 by 7 and now we're open until 2 in the morning and midnight on weekends. But we have two facilities in RPCC and Noyes which are open around the clock or when the buildings are open. When King came we really expanded to Carpenter and the dormitories. Somewhere here the Clark facility moved to Baker in the mid to late 70s but nobody really used it. We stayed there for a couple of years (we had IBM PCs there makes it sound like the 80s?) it would be a good day if we had 3 to 4 users per hour. Then we had Clara Dickson in the mid 80s and McFadden. I also remember a small Unitech facility in Rand Hall (in the 70s?) which I had to oversee when the Administrator folks were there for a while when they moved from Langmuir to Rand along their way to Day Hall.
Charlie Evans was one of the most helpful guys around. I remember when we merged. He and Al Seliga helped us a lot since we were really lost up there. I also remember a programmer, Nancy Moxley, quite a good looking blonde. Jennifer Moore ,who is still with us, was the first operator in Riley-Robb.
Prepared on 12/23/98 by John W. Rudan