Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[Paul Jones]

PJs,

I did not plan to get into computing when I applied for graduate school in geophysics. Ironically the grad school for the marine geophysics program wanted me because I knew how to design and build oceanographic equipment (I worked my way through undergrad as a prototype machinist for building underwater instrumentation) and offered a research assistant position that totally paid for grad school and living expenses. When I was 16, I told my parents I wanted to get a PhD in an interesting field of science and probably related to some aspect of oceanography but in a field that paid extremely well.

However, on my first day in grad school my major professor provided a computer ID and password, and said you will be working from now on with computers and not building geophysical equipment. I was delighted because I could already see where things were headed with computing. I became totally immersed in computing, numerical methods (conversion and approximation of equations into computer code), special function theory, and of geophysics. I minored in mathematics but enrolled in more 400 level and graduate math classes than in geophysics. Most of the integrals and partially differential equations in reflection seismology geophysics have four variables, x,y,z and time, use complex numbers(real and imaginary parts) and lots and lots of dot products. The language of choice in the 70's and 80's was FORTRAN because it handled all the housekeeping for complex numbers, double precision, and matrix multiplies and divides. The compilers in grad school were much simpler than later when I did supercomputer using compilers with three passes for syntax and symantics, the vectorization (instructions for the arithmetic unit to minimizes wasted wait cycles), and the parallelizaton (dividing the compute tasks across all cpu's and synchronizing intermediate results for the next step). You could ask the compiler to dump out the FORTRAN source code after finishing the third pass just for grins, and it looked nothing like what you wrote going in.

That is how I got into computing and never regretted making this decision. After grad school I was offered dozen of jobs in oil and gas exploration because of my geophysics degree and extensive knowledge of computing (the first oil embargo was 1973, the year I entered grad school, I got my PhD in 1978 and wham we had the second oil embargo in 1979). I developed proprietary 3D seismic reflection processing algorithms used for processing 3D data for closed bids to oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Getting the data wrong could mean leaving $100 million on the table compared to the next bidder, and hence the quest for supercomputing to allow multiple data processing runs before submitting the bids. I loved the job but the company put me on an executive fast track program where my last assignment at age 40 was CIO and also president of a telecom subsidiary (lots of world-wide telecom and also pipleline SCADA that we converted to VSAT, and used VSAT for credit card in the pump for extremely fast transaction processing with our own 6.3 meter dish). I never got back into geophysics but I retired when I turned fifty. I now work because I want to and enjoy mentoring employees and learning new and different technologies.

Well, that is how I ended up where I am today. Along the way, I have been a hobby machinist probably starting at age 14 and by 16 built my own metal lathe (looked like a Unimat SL but with a 6" swing). I would use my free period in high school in the school library reading every book on machining, machine tool theory and mechanical engineering. I am still an experimental scientist at heart even if I can only read about it now rather than doing it.

Have a great Labor Day Holiday,

Paul