Need to Know 
	Copyright ©	by Greg Utrecht  10/8/2000

Back then we all knew computers were going to get smaller.  In 1975 the smallest 
computer on campus was in a building across the street and took up a whole 
floor.  The computer lab, what there was of it, consisted of about 20 keypunch 
machines, some of them newer than the others.  None of them worked too well and 
if your computer program failed it was likely to be because a piece of lint 
didn't get punched all the way and the card reader spit up the rest of your 
deck.  

The card readers were cool, really impressive machinery, and they put that area 
of the lab right next to the dean's office so that visiting parents would be 
impressed.  Univac 1004 card readers could read a 500 card deck in about 10 
seconds, but no one I knew had any programs that big. The combination line 
printer that was attached could print out a full 132 character line with heat 
impacting on paper about every three tenths of a second.  There were three of 
these machines and the racket was too much to try to talk over.  It was time-
sharing.  The computers themselves were across the street.

In 1975 everyone who had a little bit of spare time was reading Robert Pirsig's 
_Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.  Someone named Don McLean had 
recorded a song called American Pie a few years earlier and it was still pretty 
much on everyones mind, if you were in college.  Of course we all had "Stairway 
to Heaven."  The war in Vietnam was over: we declared peace and stood by while 
the enemy invaded, but it didn't seem quite that clear at the time.  Upstairs 
the systems lab was getting their own PDP 8, a computer about one third the size 
of a refrigerator that could multi-task three users at once.  Running RSX-11, 
two users on CRTs instead of punch cards.  1975 was when I decided there was 
stuff I needed to know.

I took the time to read Zen and the Art, like every other college kid, and I 
don't know about you, but I forgot that the son was on the back of the 
motorcycle every day while Pirsig talked about philosophy and insanity and the 
great American west.  I just forgot he was there until the author remembered he 
was there, remembered that he couldn't see over Pirsig's shoulder, and gave him 
a boost so he could.  Looking back I wonder if the kid being there was just 
wishful thinking, that the kid had never been on the motorcycle.  I imagine 
Pirsig had never seen his son since that day in the mental hospital when the 
glass visitor's door closed..  Seeing his son was just something nice for him to 
imagine from time to time, and that is why the boy suddenly reappeared on the 
back of the motorcycle at the end of the book.

It took time to read that book, long enough for other people to see you carrying 
it and give knowing glances and nod at you - saying that you will enjoy it.  It 
would make a great movie I think, even after all these years, all those 
motorcycles and tuneups and slow talks about philosophy.  A man and his son 
looking at the great sights in the American west except for me it is ruined 
because I believe the son being there is a fiction, just something the author 
imagined, something he wished for, the same way I wish for some things, like 
another chance at RSX-11, or a chance to learn more about matrix algebra and 
thermodynamics so I might have graduated from engineering school.

But it turned out alright. Computers did get smaller as expected, and they 
became more plentiful which was a big surprise.   None of them run RSX-11 or 
anything very much like it.  I finally got to where I thought I had learned what 
I needed to know, although there was more to it than I first thought.  Even 
though the war is over Don McLean still sings on the radio, one more time,  "Bye 
Bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, and 
those good old boys were drinking whisky and rye, singing this'll be the day 
that I die."