[TUHS] BTL summer employees

[John P. Linderman]

Students living near MH had a bit of a leg up, having access to the
Explorers (did that include any young women?). Offspring of employees,
particularly executive level employees, seemed to appear quite often. Adam
Buchsbaum and Rich Cox and Terry Crowley come to mind. But, as the names I
remembered demonstrate, they were exceptionally bright, and often became
(valued) regular employees. I share Heinz's recollection about trying to
keep them busy. Terry Crowley joined us as a summer student, and we gave
him the "summer project" of making some improvements (like eliminating the
512-byte record size limit) to /bin/sort. He came back in under a week and
asked "What's next?" -- jpl

On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 1:15 AM Heinz Lycklama <heinz at osta.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 8/2/2020 12:05 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > I wasn't claiming to be authoritative on who got to be summer students;
> it was
> > just my observation based on who I ran into.  I do remember some other
> kids in
> > there but not sure how it happened or what became of them; Heinz may
> know.  My
> > first summer a group of underprivileged kids from Newark was brought in.
> > It mainly sticks in my mind because one of them was terrified because the
> > computer was so much smarter than he was, so someone (Hal Alles?) tasked
> him
> > with programming a PDP-11/10 via the front panel switches which gave him
> a
> > completely different perspective.
> Jon, this brings back memories of working with summer students and
> Explorer Scout high schools students (like yourself) during my years
> at Bell Labs in MH. I have to credit Carl Christensen for bringing me
> in to work with him in helping making computers and training resources
> available to Explorer Scouts on Monday evenings shortly after I started
> at Bell Labs in 1969. I enjoyed this time in helping and motivating the
> students as well as taking them on hiking and spelunking trips in NY.
> I had one summer student work for me on the LSX projects. He was so
> brilliant that I had a challenge to keep him busy with the tasks I gave
> him because he finished them so quickly. One of the motivations
> for doing LSX was actually providing a platform for the music synthesizer
> that Hal Alles was building.
>
> If I can remember any other names for you I will let you know, but
> this was more than 45 years ago ...
>
> Heinz
>
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