The material which is exerpted below, was called to my attention by Larry Schear in Dec 2013. It's from a series of self-authored narratives collected and published by the IEEE History Society called "First Hand". The subject-author of this self-narrative is Jim Haynes, a 50 year plus member of IEEE, who worked for Teletype, GE, and UCSD. My quoted exerpts are of Mr Hayne's discussion of Claude Kagan, of whom I have a biography and memorial Web page. For my use of exerpts, I emailed the IEEE History Web site, and Nathan Brewer responded with terms of use and attributions as described at the end of this document. The original document was licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 licence, and used with permission in Dec 2013.
Also, I contacted Jim Haynes, who reviewed this document, and provided dates and background information, which I've marked as such and added.
This document last updated Dec 13 2013. - Herb Johnson
The following are exerpts from "Chad is Our Most Important Product: An Engineer's Memory of Teletype Corporation" by Jim Haynes, published by the IEEE History Center. The subject of this autobiography is Jim Haynes, a 50 year plus member of IEEE, and an Arkansas EE of the 1950's, who worked for Teletype in the 1950's and later. My guess is that Jim first met Claude in the 1960's, but certainly it was after 1956. They met a number of times in Jim's career, as Jim describes in exerpts below. Additional comments I got from Jim Haynes, about this document, are noted. - Herb Johnson
The first mention of Claude Kagan is this:
"Claude Kagan of Western Electric's Princeton Research Center was an occasional visitor to Teletype [Corp in Skokie IL near Chicago]. I gather he was considered something of a pest by many people there; but I got along fine with him and enjoyed his visits. Claude and I were both enthusiasts for using small computers as components of systems. We would talk about all the neat things that could be done using Teletype equipment and minicomputers. He got to do some of them for manufacturing applications at W.E."
[Note from Jim: he likely saw Claude at Teletype a few times between May 1963 to June 1966. See his addtional comments below. - Herb]
"[But] Teletype apparently couldn't do anything with computers in systems for customers because of a strict interpretation of the 1956 AT&T consent decree. I don’t remember if he had already started *R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S.* (a computer activity for youngsters) or if that came later. He was notable for having an old Burroughs vacuum-tube computer installed in a barn on his property, with magnetic tape drives occupying the former cow-milking stalls."
later in the narrative:
"I remember walking through the [Teletype Corp.] sales area one time and noting that Teletype was hosting a meeting of the “Reactive Typewriter Society”. At the time I didn’t know what this group was about. Later I learned that it had some connection with the TRAC computer language developed by Calvin Mooers. Claude Kagan was quite an enthusiast for TRAC and used it in his work and also with a group of youngsters he was leading to study electronics and computers."
In a discussion about developing Teletype models, Jim describes some of his considerations:
"I have already mentioned Teletype’s generally under-recognized role in fostering computer time sharing by producing the Model 33. I began to get the notion that perhaps APL would be the next big thing in the time sharing business..... I also felt there was a future for what we now call word processing, which would require an upper/lower case terminal.... For these reasons I felt there was some urgency to get the Model 38 into production. Claude Kagan insisted that it was easy, that he had made a few parts and converted a Model 33 to print upper and lower case. As things turned out the Model 38 didn’t get into production for several years....
After a 2-year job at General Electric, Jim Haynes later worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), hired near the end of September 1968.
"Claude Kagan visited with us for a few days as he was attending some computer conference in the area. He insisted we could put a TRAC interpreter on our [Varian] minicomputer in a matter of days; and in fact he sat there writing code for a day or two to get us started. We added some functions to it, getting it closer to a complete implementation; but I don’t believe we ever really finished it or got it to do anything useful."
"I don’t remember now if what we implemented was TRAC or something that Claude called A String Language. The latter was actually TRAC but with the names of the functions all changed. The reason for this was that Calvin Mooers had tradmarked the name TRAC, so nobody could have a TRAC interpreter without paying him a royalty and in return his certifying that what you had was a genuine TRAC interpreter. Changing all the function names resulted in a language that was really TRAC, but presumably did not infringe the trademark and could have fewer or more functions than genuine TRAC possessed. Later on Claude and his group of youngsters, R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S., produced a language they called SAM-76, which had all the features of TRAC and a lot more."
- from accounts by Jim Haynes for the IEEE History Center
In my private correspondence with Jim in Dec 2013, he provided the following accounts of Claude's activities during Jim's Teletype and UCSC days, and later. - Herb Johnson
I was at Teletype from about May 1963 to about June 1966. I also had summer jobs there in '58 and '59 but never encountered Claude at those times. I suppose I saw him two or three times in the years I was there. Seems like some of the people considered him a pest who just criticized everything Teletype did, but had to allow him in because he was Western Electric. Not sure if I was assigned to accompany him on his visits or if I just assumed that role; at any rate I enjoyed his visits and took his criticism as constructive - some of it agreed with my own.
Teletype was the most like family of any place I ever worked - some of us still get together periodically. Only reason I left was that I could see computer technology was the future; and Teletype considered that off-limits because of the 1956 AT&T consent decree that prohibited the company from working in data processing.
"After Teletype I was with G.E. in Phoenix for two years and then landed the job at UCSC. I think my next contact with Claude was when I was there. There was a big electronics show WESCON that alternated between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and then there may have been a Joint Computer Conference in S.F. as well, or at least something of a computing nature. " Fall Joint Computer Conferences were in San Francisco in 1968 and Anaheim in 1972.- Herb
"My boss was computer pioneer Harry Huskey - he and Claude were acquainted and I remember Claude highly approved of my having that job. There are several things that I'm not clear in my mind whether they were separate events or the same event. Seeing Claude at the conference in San Francisco. Maybe more than once. Also ran into some of my former G.E. colleagues there, one of whom introduced me to H. R. J. Grosch."
"I don't know if it was that trip or another one when Claude visited our project at UCSC. Harry Huskey had got a grant from NSF to develop a small-scale computer time sharing system with graphics. At one point we had several of our graduates hired to work on this, and we had a Varian 620i computer, but then we were also working on building a machine of our own design."
I had a notion that we should be doing [the operating system] with something like TRAC as the basis. Claude visited and got us started building a TRAC interpreter to run on the 620i. I presented a paper on this at the '72 [Fall Joint Computer Conference] in Anaheim. It was probably right after that, that the federal government ran out of money and our project was terminated. Fortunately, because we had bitten off way more than we could chew. As I recall the interpreter we were coding was real TRAC except we never finished it. But Claude had something called ASL for A String Language that was TRAC with the names of the commands all changed so as to avoid the Mooers copyright."
"Then there were the Computer Faires held in San Jose when microcomputers came along and computing became a hobby. Maybe one of these was held at the same time as a professional meeting in San Francisco. Anyway, I remember Claude being there and one of the RESISTORS with him who was exhibiting at the Faire. Claude had this youngster stay at my place near Santa Cruz, and I remember he spread out his computer and things on my workbench to make sure it was all working before he showed it."
"[But] I'm looking at Wikipedia about the West Coast Computer Faire - says the first one was in 1977 in S.F. and the next in 1978 in San Jose. Since that is five years after our our project paper at [the 1972] FJCC, Claude's visit to our project must have been a different trip from the one where the youngster stayed at my house. I remember Claude was talking to one and all about the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S at the meeting, (Joint Computer Conference or WESCON) when I ran into him in San Francisco."
"Then there was the time he arranged for W.E. to send us a supply of equipment. Every story has a background, and back in my student days, late 1950s, Western Electric had a college gift program where they would send a catalog of stuff they had surplus to E.E. departments and they would request whatever they thought they could use, and then W.E. would sort it all out and try to fill the requests. So we had a lot of telephone junk around our lab when I was a student."
"When I got to UCSC I wrote to W.E. to ask if we could get added to their catalog mailing; they told me that the college gift program had been discontinued. So this stuff that W.E. sent us was apparently something that Claude had worked out on his own. There was basically a six-foot DEC rack containing a non-working minicomputer, and various other stuff, including Teletype items. I had some students working on the computer, which they were never able to fix, and we ended up giving it to the electronic music people. I think one of their guys did fix it."
"I don't think I had any further contact with Claude until my visit in 2007. I had decided it was time for me to take a long road trip to the East from my home here in Arkansas. There was an Antique Wireless Assn. convention, the only one I have ever attended. A fellow in New York had some equipment to give me. I wanted to visit the AT&T archive and the Edison site; but the AT&T archivist was away that week and the Edison [Laboratory National Park] site was closed too.
So I proceeded on to see Claude. Stayed a couple of days with him, saw what there was to see of [Claude's] barn. Took him to the Camp Evans [Infoage] place where we toured some of the museums there and he harangued someone about the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard. He had bought a computer keyboard on ebay with a switch so it could do either QWERTY or Dvorak. Personally I was unconvinced, as it seems to me even professional typists spend a lot of time on things other than typing, so a small increase in keyboard efficiency probably doesn't matter. Seems like I've read since then that the tests showing Dvorak to be superior were rigged and it really isn't any better than QWERTY."
"Then I went to Rutgers to visit the IEEE History Center, and had lunch with a friend from the days of the project at UCSC, and went on to Alexandria VA to see friends there before returning home. Claude gave me some early Bell System documents relating to Teletype. He showed me a lab notebook he had bought at a Univac surplus sale. He had intended to use the mostly-blank book himself, but when he got it home he discovered that the pages that were written in were written by [computing pioneer] J. Presper Eckert! So it must have been quite valuable."
"Other than that...at some point he had sent me a floppy disc containing a SAM76 interpreter, which ran on an IBM PC, but only on one that had the CPU chip replaced with one from NEC or somebody that had some extra instructions. I had access to an old PC and put one of those chips in it, but never really did anything with SAM76."
- Jim Haynes
Material provided to me by Jim Haynes in Dec 2013, is from private correspondence and used with his permission.
The 1972 FJCC / AFIPS '72 paper Jim mentions (courtesy of ACM.ORG) is:
"An eclectic information processing system" quote - This paper is a progress report on a computer system which is now being designed and constructed. As the title indicates, ideas that seem good have been taken from many different sources. Many features of contemporary large systems that were earlier incorporated into a plan for a large machine are now being applied to this smaller system. - end quote
"Chad is Our Most Important Product: An Engineer's Memory of Teletype Corporation"
by Jim Haynes, and published by the IEEE History Center at this Web link.
The exerpts in this document, were extracted and slightly edited with [] and ... marks, for length and context, by Herb Johnson Dec 2013. The original work and it's term of use, and my permission for use, are described below.
It's from a series of self-authored narratives collected by the IEEE History Society
called "First Hand". The subject of the quoted self-narrative is Jim Haynes, a 50 year plus member of IEEE, and an Arkansas EE of the 1950's, who worked for Teletype in the 1950's and later.
For this use, I contacted IEEE History and Nathan Brewer, Digital Content Administrator, IEEE History Center. He responded on Dec 11 2013: "...the text is licensed under Creative Commons [3.0] which allows for redistribution as long
as the IEEE History Center and Jim [Haynes] is properly attributed. The full details of the license can be viewed
here [at this link]". The link apparently implies the licence is CC 3.0 BY NC ND. Nathan Brewer later confirmed this document was acceptable as "proper attribution [of]...exact quotes in the appropriate context" and also "complies with the CC licence".
A link to the CC 3.0 license is required in the terms of use.
License for IEEE material this document? I can't judge if this is a "fair use" document and unlicensed from the original; and also derivative and so falls under the same CC license as the original. I suggest anyone interested in the IEEE-archived material, contact IEEE about further use. - Herb Johnson
The license status of this document is described above. Dec 12 2013.
R. Cutts, J. Haynes, H. Huskey, J. Kaubisch, L. Laitinen, G. Tollkuhn, E. Yarwood
Pages: 473-478, Proceedings of the December 5-7, 1972, AFIPS / Fall Joint Computer Conference, part I
IEEE History material
Herb Johnson
New Jersey, USA
here's how to email Herb Johnson