Jolitz Heritage pdp

Jolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz.

 23 hits  [ >>> ]
Nr.DateTitle / Description
1 William Jolitz - Early Years
On the formative history of William Jolitz. Part of the Jolitz Heritage Site for the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley.
2 Son of an Aerospace Family

William Frederick (Bill) Jolitz was born 1957 in Michigan. He grew up in the midwest, east, and then finally western United States, as the family followed the aerospace business around the country. William Jolitz attended Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California, and worked at NASA Ames Research Center while a high school and college student. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and is a member of the Berkeley Engineering Society.

3 William Frederick Jolitz NASA Projects

While in high school, William Jolitz worked at NASA Ames Research Center supporting a number of projects:

  • For Dr. Gordon Auguson in the Space Sciences Astrophysics, he lead a small team that machined, ground, polished and figured an 9 inch hyperbolic secondary mirror for the Kuiper Airbone observatory.
  • For Leonard McGee, he ported a navigation simulation program from an IBM 360 to a CDC 7600
    		•
    June 1974 Certificate signed by Hans Mark.

  • For Charles T. Jackson Jr. and Dallas Denery, he assisted in a computer automated navigation and guidance system for general aviation aircraft.
  • With the Sensory Aids Foundation, he designed and built a prototype talking computer development system for the blind.
  • Various other systems integration projects (30+) involving scientific and navigation issues, including a paper on navigational error estimation.
    • 4 Berkeley Student Years
    On the formative history of William Jolitz. Part of the Jolitz Heritage Site for the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley.
    5 William Jolitz and Berkeley in the 70's/80's

    William Frederick Jolitz attended the University of California, Berkeley during a period of great change and opportunity. While still staying involved with NASA and "Silicon Valley" to the south (often by motorcycle, same day), Cal's environment of science, engineering and technology was very different.

    Before Cal, William Jolitz was used to technology like the IBM 370/145 DOS/VS (BAL, PL/1) of the local college, either the IBM 360/67 TSS (Fortran, PL/1G) or the CDC 7600 (Run76, Compass) of NASA, or the UCLA IBM 360/95 and Stanford 360/65 (Algol W). Science was liquid helium dewars, oscilloscopes, and actual measurement of physical observations. Engineering was breadboarding of devices and equipment acquired from affliated groups in a shared budget relationship.

    6 Science at Cal in the 70's - Astronomy, Physics and Electrical Engineering

    Classes in Physics were competitive due to pre-med and engineering students viewing it as a "battle of attrition" rather than first steps in a career. Hands-on laboratory experience, while assigned, was deemphasized, with the primary focus the discovery of potential theoretical candidates to refine and reduce. For experimentalist scientists this was pure hell. For engineers and pre-med students, more an ordeal to be endured and forgotten.

    Undergraduate resources were extremely limited, as grad resources were starved and had more priority.
    7 William Jolitz and Technology at Cal in late 70's

    Arriving at Cal, William Jolitz was surprised to find Cal Computer Services pushed most student work from many different departments through a cranky CDC 6400 in the basement of Evans Hall for batch mode processing (Pascal). Even the cardpunch was a decade older machines (026's with BCD) - many of the cards required manual "multipunch" like 6-7-8-9 to signal "end-of-file". The first minicomputers were being phased in with the Math-Stat Computer Science PDP 11/45 on the 4th floor of Evans Hall, which ran UNIX part of the time and BASIC the rest of the time.


     

    The 2.8BSD kernel was originally work done for the Cory Hall PDP 11/70, and release engineered on the PDP 11/40 in Stanley Hall (since rebuilt completely). The Stanley Hall PDP 11/40 was in the middle of a lab for molecular research ("regulation in ATCase") - William once had to clean by hand all hundred corroded edge connectors with an ink eraser so it would correctly run the toggled-in diagnostics of "1: cmp #0,#0 ; je 1b; halt" for hours instead of stopping in seconds.

    8 Engineering at Cal in the 1980's

    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) was a hot major, with varied activities from Op Amp simulation via Spice, to conventional architecture, design and development (for example, William took CS252 with Alan Kotok, which could have been subtitled "... or how I built the PDP/KL-10", M box and the E box).

    The Computer Science Undergraduate Club (CSUC), populated primarily by physics undergrads, acquired a heavily modified PDP-5 computer as its first system, for a while kept in the basement of the Eshelman hall. The group was later renamed the Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA) when they got an office in Evans Hall.

    9 Mid 1970's where the action was

    C programs, then unusual, were cross compiled on the NASA ASRS PDP-11 Unix system located in the Life Sciences, and downloaded over the SYSTRAN/ADTRAN RS-232 serial network strung around Ames in pre-networking days. Discovered UNIX, the Arpa net, and had an account on mit (wfj@mit-ai, a nice PDP-10 running ITSS). Involvement with brilliant researchers and hackers of the day pushed this project further to the reaches.

    10 Introduction to UNIX

    When researching text to speech, I attempted to obtain a copy of a program done by Doug McIlroy at Bell Labs Murray Hill. In talking with him on the phone, he said "Sure, send a check for $20,000". Shocked, I asked why, "Comes with a PDP-11 operating system, which lets you compile and run it". Turned out never used the program, but did end up using UNIX and C extensively.

     23 hits  [ >>> ]
    [ << ] [ >> ] [ Benjamin Torsten (Ben) Jolitz ] [ Lynne Greer Jolitz ]

    [Return to prior page]

    1 viewing this now