There were a number of brands around. Ours were Fridens. The Friden was a huge machine by today's standards -- as big as an old standard typewriter and much, much heavier. Inside were hundreds of little gears and levers that would drive a Swiss watchmaker into paroxysms of ecstasy.

Figure 3: Fridens advertisement.

Photo from Old Computer Museum.

The Friden worked much like the adding machines used for businesses, except it would multiply and divide, as well as add and subtract. There was a keyboard having 10 columns of 10 digit keys, and a carriage like a typewriter. On the carriage were numbered wheels that spun. You typed a number in by punching (that's the right word -- no electronics or power-assist here) one key in each column, and then punched the "go" key. To the accompaniment of the noise of a threshing machine, the carriage slewed, the wheels spun, and in a matter of decaseconds, there was your answer. Division was quite a sight to behold, and on those few machines that could do square roots, the noise level rose alarmingly as more and more wheels got into the act.

But most of us didn't have access to the square root machines, and a measure of your proficiency with a Friden was how quickly you could find a square root on a non-square-root Friden. There was a neat algorithm for it that I've never forgotten (no, it's not Newton's method, it's an exact, noniterative algorithm). I also learned the famous "Friden March," a calculation that caused the carriage to chunk along in a neat, "rah, rah, rah-rah-rah" rhythm.

Despite the horrible noises emitted by the Fridens -- sounds reminiscent of the clashing of a nonsynchromesh truck transmission -- it always gave reliable answers. Over a period of five or six years, I never once saw a Friden give a wrong answer.

The big advantage of the Friden, other than its tendency to get the correct answer, was that we could calculate to as many as 10 digits of accuracy -- unheard of until then. But most of our calculations were done to only five digits or so, because that's as many as were in the trig tables. Later I managed to get a book of six-place tables. It was a big book.

Looking back upon the space race and all the high-tech things that were involved in it, helps to remember that, at least through projects Mercury and Gemini, the work was mostly done with slide rules and Fridens.

As in college, a lot of our output in those days were graphs, and again a large part of our skill was our ability to plot microscopic dots at the right places on a piece of log-log paper, and then fair a smooth curve through them. Back in college, we tended to plot graphs with anywhere from three to seven points on them, but NASA needed much more accuracy. So a lot of our time went into calculating the data for the many points to be plotted. And that's where I learned about spreadsheets.

These were the original spreadsheets, of course -- real sheets of 14" x 17" paper, ruled into rows and columns. What we did was to organize the "input" data into one or more columns. Each subsequent column involved operations on previous columns. If you've ever used Excel, I don't have to explain further.

For simple problems with not too many entries, and for problems not needing great accuracy, we would use the good ol' 18" slide rule. For more complex problems, we would use the book of trig functions and the Friden.

For really long problems, we used Donna.

Donna was the department secretary, who doubled as a calculator operator. Donna supported some seven engineers, and had the patience of Job. She would sit there all day, day after day, crunching out those numbers, which we would then plot up and analyze. Donna prided herself on using 10-digit accuracy for everything, even if the input data was only good to three digits. If any errors were going to be introduced, it wasn't going to be at her end.

One day I got a really big problem -- one that seemed too big even for Donna to deal with, considering her other duties. I asked a colleague, "What do you do with problems that are too big for Donna?" He said, very matter of factly, "Oh, you take them to the Computer Room."

You should have seen my eyes light up. I had been reading all about the "Giant Brains" -- had even learned to program one in college, though I never saw it (the school didn't actually own one). I couldn't wait to see how the folks in the Computer Room dealt with my problem. Eagerly I got directions from my colleague, prepared my data and rushed over to the building he described. Following his directions, I walked down the hall until I arrived at a set of double doors, with a large sign proclaiming, sure enough, "Computer Room." From the other side of the door came a satisfying clattering of high-tech machinery, hard at work.

Holding my breath, I eased open the door.

Inside was a huge room. There must have been 300 desks, all arranged neatly in rows. At each desk sat a woman, and on each desk was a Friden. The women were the computers! I kid you not (sorry, no men were there).

I found out later that their official job description was "GS-2, Computer."

In this JPL photo, notice that the "computers" ran the Fridens with their left hands, handled the paperwork with their right. The lady in the center of the photo is filling out a geen-you-wine spreadsheet. To view the full-size image, this link takes you to the photo and article on JPL and NASA's web site.

Once I had gotten over the shock, I approached the "head computer." She explained to me how things worked. You used the same spreadsheet format we used -- and still use today -- except that each column only involved a single math operation. If, for example, the first two columns were the inputs, x and y, then the header for column three might read:

(9)

After all the calculations were defined, you turned things over to the computers who filled the numbers in. The foreperson assigned different parts of the job to different women, depending on the load. For a really big job, she would keep several parts running in parallel. The first multitasking, multiprocessing computer system, I suppose.

It all actually went quite smoothly. The computers rarely made a mistake, and they used redundant calculation to catch any errors. They would even plot the results up for me, although I rarely used that service. My boss grumbled that they used dull pencils and didn't know how to interpolate. He and I both found that we could plot more accurately.

Progress is wonderful
Well, things didn't stay that way for long. We eventually did get real computers (the nonhuman kind): the IBM 701, followed by the 702, 704, 709, 7094, etc. By this time I was at a different job, I had learned how to program in FORTRAN and some other very peculiar languages, and I was building a bit of a reputation as a computer expert. I had built some pretty slick simulation programs, and we were flying imaginary spacecraft all around a simulated moon. The number of computations we performed in a day would have taken those human computers their whole lifetimes, multiprocessing or not. It was an exciting time. (For the record, I once calculated that I could have generated every one of the trajectories I'd done in four years, 10,000 times over, in the time it takes a modern PC to boot. We'll discuss why it takes a modern PC to boot, another day).

In those days, I still had my slide rule (the 10" one -- NASA made me give back the 18" one and the six-place trig tables when I left). I even had a 6" rule for my shirt pocket, and a 1 1/2" one as a tie clasp, for emergencies. But the slide rule got used less and less as better ways came along.

One day a colleague whom I'll call John came to see me. He said, "Jack, I've come up with a neat computer program that I'd like you to take a look at."

"OK, John," I said. "What does it do?"

"Well," he replied, "Remember back in the good old days when we had to do computing by hand? Remember the way we used to make up those spreadsheets and turn them over to the computer ladies?"

I acknowledged that I had. We spent a little time congratulating ourselves for our progress, at having gotten away from such primitive methods.

John said, "Well, I've developed a computer program that works the same way. All you have to do is to define the formulas for each column of the spreadsheet and give the data. The computer does the calculations just like the computer ladies used to do and gives you a printout that looks just like a spreadsheet. I think it'll be just the ticket for those people who don't know how to program in FORTRAN. It will open up the use of computers to lots more people."

I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and said, "John, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard."

There was a moment of silence as John absorbed what I had just said. The sparkle in his eyes dimmed a bit. Crestfallen, he whispered, "Why?"

Now, in my defense you have to understand: in those days we were taught that computer time was precious -- $600 per hour, at a time when $600 would buy more than a ticket to a rock concert. It was important, we were told, to keep the CPU busy doing productive work at all times. It was considered far more cost-effective to waste engineers' time than computer time.

So I explained, "John, now that we have electronic computers, we have to learn to do things their way. Anybody who plans to be an engineer in the '60s is going to have to learn to speak to computers in their language. You and I have learned to program so we can do that. What you're trying to do is to ask the computer to make up for the deficiencies of the engineer. You're forcing the computer to do extra work, just because the engineer is too lazy or too dumb to learn the computer's language. You're never going to sell an idea that uses a computer so inefficiently!"

As I spoke, you could see John slowly fall apart. His jaw fell slack, his shoulders slumped, and he actually seemed to age by years, right before my eyes. Finally he turned and left, a beaten and broken man.

I never saw John again. He sent me an example of the output of his program (I recall that it could do automatic graphing of its results, which was quite an innovation at the time). I promptly filed it under "dumb ideas." I heard through the grapevine that John kept trying for awhile, halfheartedly, to interest someone in his spreadsheet program, but as I had predicted he was never able to do so, and he faded into obscurity, along with his program.

And that's why you had to wait 15 more years for VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel.

Jack Crenshaw is a systems engineer and the author of Math Toolkit for Real-Time Programming. He holds a PhD in physics from Auburn University. E-mail him at jcrens@earthlink.net. For more information about Jack click here