Life and times in K Lab – A scientific Animal House

On my first day of work at one of the Navy’s scientific laboratories, I was unceremoniously dropped off in the office of the department head for the Computation and Analysis Laboratory, more commonly known as K Lab. Since I didn’t know the department head from Adam, I was nonchalant toward him and his attitude. I had just spent four years in the Air Force during the height of the Vietnam War. Even though I never directly served in the war zone, I felt that I had never the less made some small but meaningful contribution to the war effort while in the Air Force and initially wondered what, if any, contribution he may have made. In short, I had a chip on my shoulder.

My conversation with the holy man of geekdom lasted about two minutes.

His first question was, “Where would you like to work?”

I responded, “I’ve read a little bit about computer science so I would like to focus on that.”

He responded, “We need mathematicians in the ballistics section to support the derivation of sight angle plots used in the bombing missions in Vietnam.”

I wasn’t too enamored with this idea since I was basically an anti-war type guy even though I served my country for four years in my own fashion. I had wanted to serve in a more indirect role.

I started to disagree with his proposal, but stopped, mainly because he abruptly cut off the conversation, called the ballistics branch head to his office, and dispatched us both to the ballistics branch area post haste.

Over the next few months, I adjusted somewhat to this new environment. As I later learned, K Lab had a reputation for housing more maladjusted people per capita than any other organization in the civilized world. To put it more succinctly, most of the people working in K Lab were nuts.

There was one gentleman who literally lived in his office. He sustained himself for days on end by eating candy and sodas from vending machines. He would take bird baths in the bathrooms every few days, but since he didn’t change his clothes for weeks on end, the odor emanating from his office became so unbearable to the people in offices close to his, that the powers that be would send over a decontamination unit every few weeks to essentially spray his office sufficiently to lower the smell to a tolerable level. They would literally roll his chair, with him in it, out into the hallway and decontaminate the room to some degree. Since he had a PhD and wrote a scientific paper every few decades, the department head considered him a model employee.

One of the scientists was caught by his superior engaging in a Clintonesque indiscretion with his secretary on his office desk after hours. Since he was an important lieutenant in the K Lab oligarchy, the department head promptly gave him a slap on the wrist and fired the secretary.

There was one young gentleman who was deathly afraid of the opposite sex. He could function very well as long as he didn’t have to interface with a female. He would literally stand at attention against any nearby wall when a female would approach him or just walk by him. He was eventually fired for walking under an umbrella which he used to protect himself from the fluorescent lights in the lab’s hallways. He used a small wattage lamp while he worked in his office, but wanted to protect himself from the fluorescent glare when he ventured outside his office. Of course, a computer screen was an anathema for him.

We had another gentleman who gained the ignominious nickname of The Stargazer by the women who worked in the lab. He acquired that moniker by going out of his way to position himself and his gaze upward at opportune times when he and members of the opposite sex were traversing the stairs at the same time. He knew that the women knew what he was doing but he continued this activity with edacious glee.

At the time I was in K Lab, large mainframe computers were just beginning to be used by the military to simplify and speed up the process of computing essential military ordinance information, e.g., the production of bomb ballistic tables and fuse arming statistics. In fact, the famous saying about finding a bug in a computer program supposedly sprouted at this lab when an actual bug was found in one of the computer’s relays. The mainframes that we used during that time had less power than a mid level personal computer has today. However, that lab and those computers are now considered essential stepping stones in the formation of the computer age.

But, hey, we had fun with the computer too. In the early stages of computer use at the lab, a major step was the hard wiring of several K Lab offices to the computer via a monitor and keyboard so that individual scientists could query the computer to find the status of their jobs and relay messages to the computer operators. Initially, we couldn’t submit a job directly to the computer. That was done by physically taking a box of IBM punch cards which contained the analysis program’s FORTRAN or COBOL source code to a computer input area where technicians would process the cards into the computer. The computer would then compile the source code, execute the program and then print out the results on perforated computer paper. We could check on the status of the jobs on our monitors in our offices and, when notified that the jobs were complete, we would go to the output area and pick up the results. All of this may sound mundane and ridiculous now, but it was state of the art then, baby.

But, I digress. Sure, we could monitor the jobs on our little monitors, but we got the most excitement out of these tools while monitoring the comings and goings of personnel from other labs on the base who had to physically bring their IBM cards to K Lab to be processed by the computer. Some of the runners, as we called them, were fetching young ladies from the nearby communities who worked at the base as technicians. One of the young ladies was more fetching than most, so we developed a code for disseminating a notice when she arrived in K Lab with her IBM cards. A notice would go out to all of the monitors that “the cow is in the barn.” At that point, if one were inclined, a trip to the computer input/output area was deemed necessary. The purpose of this sojourn was to pick up computer output, of course.

To be continued…