delta early days

["Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@Sarnoff.COM>]

my real involvement with delta as a student was from the startup (which 
i've forgotten when it was ...) on the 11/20 to its exit from EE in, what 
1978? I still have old listings from 1972 or so with announcements from 
carolyn. she still lives in the pa area. 

I was a student user for its early days, and was involved as a worker 
during its middle age, up to and slightly after the time it moved out of 
EE. I still remember our arguments in '77 or so with the DEC guys about 
source: at some point they decided we could no longer have source, and we 
were unhappy as could be. Does this sound familiar to current problems? 

I started working on delta in 75/76. Summer of 76 i was delivering 
decwriters all over delaware, and trying to improve joe mattioni's 
decwriter logging program. I was also learning teco ...

at some point in 76 our 11/70 came in with unix v6. That changed my life. 
It made rsts seem primitive and slow, and i gradually became less 
involved with rsts and more involved with unix. that's why i type in 
lower case. at some point the machine moved out, and dave robinson's 
involvement ended. 

it changed a lot when it went to willard. I never really was happy with
the change. in EE there were two goals as I saw it: get computing to the
schools, and for those who ran it, get them up to speed as
computer/electrical engineering students. The production of quality folks
from the latter program was quite amazing. People such as aaron insinga,
gary luckenbaugh, ron cox, and so on came through this program. 

Oh yes do I remember Plato. It was a money sink, and I never saw any real 
value. I remember Dave Robinson encouraging someone (??) to build a fruit 
fly genetics program that displayed on the tek storage tube computer 
terminal, the goal being to show that RSTS plus graphics could be a far 
more cost effective teaching tool than the Plato system. The lesson was 
never well received by the powers that be, given their huge investment in 
Plato. Worldwide I believe UDEL was the only installation of Plato 
outside U. Illinois -- 'nough said. 

through this whole time dave robinson was my mentor. delta made a major 
difference in my life. 

OH yeah: am i the only one who knows why ed jones called it 'jes70'? 

I'll have to type more later but time to go pretend to work.

ron

Ron Minnich                |Java: an operating-system-independent, 
rminnich@sarnoff.com       |architecture-independent programming language
(609)-734-3120             |for Windows/95 and Windows/NT on the Pentium
ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html