It truly paralyzed my left side. With therapy I've recovered a lot of the mobility

- but subsequently I've had three more very small strokes. The last one affected my throat muscles - I have a tough time talking.

So I applied for a job at IBM as a tool engineer. Well, it just so happened that at that time IBM was contemplating ?starting? a new customer engineering training course. They wanted about ten diverse bodies to attend this course and the course was - don't go to class, don't go to school, but go to the manufacturing site where all the assembly was done. and make machines, do machines, learn how they work talk to the experts on the assembly line and final test, and learn all we could on every machine in the product line. And at the end of that you would be a customer engineer.

I didn't know what a customer engineer was, but it sounded good to me. so I signed up for the course and over the period of a year I build five examples of every machine of the line, and learned all about everything (chuckle ;-)) And it was a really great experience.

I don't know how manufacturing managers felt about this, you know having a guy come in and manufacturing had to teach these guys every thing they knew, then they would get up and walk away and (chuckle) go some place else.

But it all worked out well - After the school was over, I was assigned to the Washington, DC office I had the usual customer engineering tasks to do - servicing all the different equipment. Eventually I was promoted to the refurbishing of accounting machines. I didn't have to go see customers anymore, I just stayed in the work place there in Washington and serviced accounting machines.

All during this time I really wanted to be a design engineer. So I had a couple of ideas, so one idea was - wouldn't it be great to have a calculating key punch that you could punch in the two factor fields and then the machine would automatically punch the answer either a sum or a difference or a product or a [quotient] or a remainder in the card. So at night I would spend my time designing the machine. I was pretty good at circuits by this time. When I started the customer engineering course I couldn't get my way through a simple simple two relay circuit, I just didn't know how to do it.

But at the end of the course I was able to almost memorize the 402 wiring diagram and fix the darn things almost without reference to the wiring diagram. Got to be pretty good at that. I also had another idea during this time. I never did like the interpreter, was it the 511 or something like that? 512, I don't know. The interpreter printed right on the card, so I designed another interpreter that used print wheels like the 407. And I designed the entire thing, and I had all these drawings, of these two machines.

I went to my CE supervisor and asked him to get me an interview with engineering. But he said "Oh no, I can't do that - they wouldn't be interested."

Well it just so happened -later - that IBM was increasing their effort in their engineering lab and needed new talent. So they sent interviewers out to the local offices to interview. Well, I managed to get an interview and (chuckle) it was only about three or four days later I got invited to the engineering lab for further interviews and then I came back to Washington.

And my supervisor had to come to me and say well, (chuckle) you've been offered a job in Endicott". And he was overwhelmed at the money that they were offering me. Really disappointed to lose me.

So I went and had a grand time there . First project was designing an increased capacity card line of equipment particularly the accounting machine. I used the 402 as the basis and designed new counters and new card feeds and I don't know what all - circuits. It would read this hundred sixty column card. I don't know if you guys have any idea what that was but 12 rows of punches in a card can be divided into two six bit rows and we used binary encoding in each column so we that had a hundred sixty column card. And the guys at Poughkeepsie were designing the keypunches.

Well, I worked on that for a while and it finally died for some reason, I don't what the reason was. Then, some time during this period, the director of education, I think Perry Pronie, got a hold of me and asked me to teach the engineering ???turn??? course. This is the course where we took a variety of engineers of various types and we hired these people and needed to train these people to be *IBM* engineers which is a different kind of engineering, which is a different kind of engineering than is done in the rest of the world.

So I said "No, I can't do that - First of all, I absolutely would freeze up in front of an audience - I just couldn't talk and I get so nervous and shaky". And he says "Well, don't worry about that", so he finally talked me into doing it. And, son-of-a-gun, I lost all of that fear teaching that course and I taught all of these guys how all of our machines worked - how relays work and what relay circuits are and how they work and how they are designed and so on.

Then IBM hired a guy fresh out of MIT and he was an expert in switching circuits so he came to IBM Endicott and taught one course in switching circuits. Then he was re-assigned so I volunteered to teach that course too. So I went on to teach several courses in circuits design and also computer architecture. So I had a great time teaching - in addition to my regular job. One of those jobs was working on the design of the 557 interpreter and I designed particularly the ?zone? unit.

So - after that I was assigned to the Advanced Systems Development Department and worked there on various proposals - primarily doing the systems design, drawing up all the flow diagrams and the circuit diagrams. I was pretty good at that.

And then came the World Wide Accounting Machine and that is a whole nuther story. But I did some preliminary work in the Advanced Systems Development Division and when Ralph Mork was assigned to be the Electronics Accounting Machine manager he picked me to do the design work.

I don't know if he picked Tim Engram and Russ Rowley, but anyway eventually, we were in the same department all though I had little contact with them. I think Russ had something to do with the core memory. Tim/Jim Engram was the circuits man, he really knew circuits very well. And after the - oh, we had lots of fights about which system was the best - mine, or one proposed in San Jose or the World Wide Accounting Machine proposed in Germany and France - we had a go-around.

But eventually my system was picked and they finally headed for production. And it was somewhere along here that Shel Jacobs showed up and poured new life into the program and really made it go. I'll never forget his contributions, they were really great.

Shel said "No, No, a whole lot more than that" Well, Watson heard about this - Tom Watson Jr. - and as we got nearer and nearer to the announcement, he began to get worried about the discrepancy in the numbers.

So one day he showed up at my office and sat down and said "Now, tell me about this program." - And so I did, and then he said "Do you really think we are going to sell thousands of these things?" and I says "Oh Yeah, no doubt about it." then he says "Well, OK" and he accepted my word, and we had our program.

And it really did, it went very well - we had Chuck Branscom who was a great manager, and then Bo Evans who was supreme, he was an incredible manager. And we had Shel Jacobs who was great with the marketing end of it. And we were just rolling, tooling along just fine -

George Barntique - goll-darn - he still around?

But one of the original points of contention with the World Wide Accounting Machine was the cost of the plug-board. Did you do the analysis on that?

The question was "Did T.J. Watson ever come back into your office and congratulate you for being right - or did you ever see him again?

I don't know about the rest of the guys here, but I think we contributed a lot to our pension plan!

- thank you so much for your time