4-bits, 8-bits, and a dollar!

The product was called Callback/3000, kind of like that satirical tv show, "Mystery Science Theater 3000." MST3K premiered on November 24, 1988. My product premiered in the early 1980s! The "3000" in my product's name stood for HP-3000, the minicomputer manufactured and marketed during those years.

When I was the Product Manager for a software company, we received an invitation to demonstrate our product to a client. We had a new version of our flagship product. To say it was "wobbly" would be an understatement. The first part of our presentation was the typical PowerPoint. Our client asked a few questions but just wanted us to move to the demo; that's when the fun began.

When I owned an R&D and manufacturing company, I was asked to build a tension control for chill-rolls on Harris web presses. My radical approach was to use optical encoders instead of tension sensors. It worked like a dream!

Today I talk about the time I was called on to work on a machine that was too hot to touch. The moment I opened the door to the factory, I immediately thought of Dante's Vestibule of hell, the one with the gate that bears an inscription "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

My first experience with debilitating heat was when I was given a project to install a wireless language lab in school buses. This was an experiment. A school board wanted to try to create a way for kids that had very long commutes to school to officially fulfill one class. Instead of high school kids wasting time in a bus for two hours each day, they could learn a language and get credit for it. I thought it was a great idea. I just didn't appreciate how difficult it would be to make their vision a reality.

If you've ever watched a rock concert, you may have noticed the lead guitar player using several foot-actuated devices to change the sound of their guitar. And, if you are old enough to have bought the Beatles' Rubber Soul album, you may have noticed in the liner notes that Paul played "fuzz bass" on "Think for Yourself." Paul firmly established the use of guitar pedals in rock music.

So, today, I want to tell you about a PLC project I did for a large industrial factory during the mid-1980s. The purpose of the project was to replace a set of mechanical relays and discreet analog devices with a programmable process that would control solid-state relays and replace a bunch of individual temperature controllers and load cell PID controllers. I used a Gould Modicon PLC for the project. It was an interesting challenge, especially because the company didn't have any schematics for the existing system. The first thing I had to do was figure out what was going on, and build out a set of schematics based on my observations. Many times during this effort, I sat down with engineers that knew what should be taking place. I showed them what I thought was actually taking place. Both the company's engineers and I would often be shaking our heads as we walked away from these meetings.

During the 1990s, I had built a large enough network of people that I could contract myself out for short-term programming jobs. One of the jobs was a six-month contract to help finish a call center for an electric company in Pineville, Louisiana. The application we developed for the customer service representatives (CSPs) was written using the PowerBuilder programming language. The interactive voice response (IVR) program was a commercial application that ran on an IBM AS400. And some single-purpose apps were a mix of commercial software and custom software written in C++.

In the early 1980s, I led a fun project paid for by the state of Indiana. The intent was to create a synergy between academia and private-sector technology companies. These kinds of partnerships are very common today, but in the 1980s it was very bleeding-edge. The goal of the project was to create a computer program that would create customer-specific configurations based on every possible configuration of the company's existing products. The hope was that most, if not all, customer needs could be satisfied by the CPU boards, memory boards, general I/O boards and so forth. All without having to build any customer-specific boards.

Every programming language has a set of standards prescribing how variable names, function names, class names, and so forth should be structured. For variable names, COBOL uses hyphens (-) and Pascal uses PascalCase. Some languages use camelCase and some use snake_case. Today I'm tell my story about being bitten by snake_case.