Attention!!
Not so great
expectations
I rolled over and stared at
the clock again.
“Two forty-five. Great. ”
I shouldn’t have been this
nervous. Tomorrow was a day
just like any other day.
“Go to sleep, you
bonehead, ” I said to no one in
particular.
Well, OK. Tomorrow was
the day 1 started my co-op job,
but still. 1 mean, I’d climbed
into bed four and a half hours
ago. Now, after three trips to
the bathroom, dozens of push
ups and even a late night
“Gilligan’s Island” festival on
the tube, I still couldn’t seem to
keep my eyes closed for more
than a minute.
“OK, why are you so
nervous?” I asked myself.
Why was I nervous? I
reminded myself that I had
made an A in each of my
computer science classes, and I
had been on the Dean’s Honor
Roll a couple of times. In fact, I
noted, common sense not
withstanding, I was an above
average-intelligence type of
guy. So why was 1 so nervous?
Because tomorrow was THE
DAY. The one I’d worked for
since I’d been in college. The
day that had infatuated me
since I’d learned about co
oping at freshman orientation.
Before this I had only dreamed
about the prestige that came
with working for a company
like IBM. I could only imagine
the honor of having the words
“Co-op Student” marked on
my transcript. I had only
fantasized about the massive
quantities of cash that I would
greedily be hoarding. And
tomorrow it all came together.
But were these the reasons
that I couldn’t sleep?
No.
The real reason I couldn’t
sleep was because I was scared
to death. Oh sure, I had my
good grades, and I could
program as well as the next
computer science major, and I
even had most of the answers
memorized to the “Sports”
portion of Trivial Pursuit, but in
one area I felt woefully
inadequate: knowledge of
computers themselves.
I could see going to work
tomorrow and having my boss
say, “Well, Kevin, since you’re
new here we’ll start you out
slowly. We’ve been having
trouble with our latest version
of BIOS, so I need you to write
a new BIOS, bum it into an
EPROM, and have it on my
desk in thirty-five minutes. Oh,
and bring me some
doughnuts. ”
Right.
What the Hell is BIOS? And
how do I bum it into an
EPROM? For that matter,
what’s an EPROM? And where
am I supposed to find
doughnuts?
So there it was, I realized, as
I drifted back to reality. I was
afraid that they would want me
to do something that I didn’t
know anything about. I was
nervous because they might
expect me to know something
about which I was totally
ignorant. And I was scared
because my technical
knowledge was close to zilch.
“But wait, you idiot. Isn’t
that why you’re here in the first
place?”
I lay in the dark for a while,
pondering the question I had
asked myself.
And, of course, the answer
was “yes. ” That was why I was
here. That was why the other
co-ops were here. That was
why the permanent workers
were here. To learn. To
challenge ourselves. To think.
I rolled over and stared at
the clock again.
“Three fifteen. Great. ”
I finally dozed off, only to
dream about not being able to
sleep.
First Day Blues
“So that’s it? That’s all I
have to do?”
My questions were directed
to one Randy C. Hack, an
electrical engineering co-op
who had worked in this
department the summer
before.
“Yeah, ” he replied. “At least
for the first week or so. ”
I was incredulous. I had
spent the whole night tossing
and turning for this?
“So wait; you’re saying that
all I have to do is sit in my office
and read an IBM PC Disk
Operating System manual? I
don’t have to create new
memory chips or design a new
microprocessor or get Mr.
Davis doughnuts or anything?”
Randy looked at me as if he
thought I was a complete
bonehead.
“No.”
“Oh.”
As we walked in silence back
to our offices, I thought about
the meeting that we had just
had with our manager, Mr. Ben
Davis.
What had Mr. Davis said
again?
“. . . And what we mainly
deal with in this department are
two Personal Computer (PC)
to Host communication
packages. The first package,
Entry Emulator, known also as
EE, can handle one PC session
and one host session. The
other product, Workstation
Program (WSP), is a little more
complex ...”
Mr. Davis continued on for a
while longer, but I must admit
that I had trouble concentrating
on what he was saying. My
brain was still reeling from the
information he had given us
during the first thirty seconds of
the meeting. For instance, what
in the world was a “session?” A
“host?” Even the term
“resident memory” was a bit
murky, although at least I had
heara the phrase before.
Fortunately, the meeting
wasn’t a total loss; I mean, I did
learn the names of the other
co-ops, and, more importantly,
that we got paid every
Monday. Outside that,
however . . .
Randy’s voice interrupted
my thoughts. I looked up to see
him wheeling a cart loaded
with computers toward my
desk.
“The guy who had this
computer before you re
formatted the hard drive,” he
said as he put the system on
my desk. “So feel free to
modify the config dot sys and
the autoexec dot bat in any
way you want, OK?”
“Oh, sure. No problem. ”
Uh-huh. Right. Config dot
sys? Autoexec dot bat? This
had the potential to be a really
long day.
I started thumbing through
the Disk Operating System
(DOS) manual, looking for the
aforementioned config dot sys
and autoexec dot bat.
Unfortunately, this led to more
questions about such unknown
entities as batch files, buffers
and resident programs.
Jeez, what had started as an
incredibly easy day had
progressed into a nightmare in
a matter of minutes.
Would this Monday never
end?
My mother, the
investigative reporter
Perhaps the hardest thing
about this job was explaining
exactly what we did. Even
more difficult was explaining
what our products did. During
the fourth week of the
semester, I found myself
explaining (or at least trying to
explain) both to my mother.
“Well, Honey, what do you
do at work?”
“Well, Mom, we have these
software packages — ”
“What’s software?” she
interrupted.
Visions of a conversation
from Hell flittered across my
mind.
“Urn, it’s programs and stuff,
OK? Anyway, we test these two
programs with other existing
and forthcoming IBM products
to make sure that they all work
well together with no problems,
see?”
Gosh, that was easy enough.
Until she asked the question
that I feared the most:
“Well, urn, what do your
programs do?”
This had always been the
toughest thing to describe to
people who had asked me
questions about my job. I
thought about giving her the
“Top secret — can’t talk about
it” line, but I decided to go for a
different approach.
“Well, Mom, we have this
one package called
Workstation Program, and it
can have up to six PC sessions
and four host sessions. Our
other package, called Entry
Emulator, has only one PC
session and one host session.
See?”
It was my hope to intimidate
my mother with terms that she
knew nothing about. Living
away from home had
obviously made me forget my
mom’s persistence.
“Now just slow down,
Kevin. One thing at a time.
Now, what is a host?”
“A host is a mainframe,
Mom. It’s a big computer that
does all the work. Let’s say
you’re a travel agent and you
want to find out if a flight is
available. The computer that
keeps track of flights and prices
and stuff is the mainframe, or
host. You would be entering
your request from what is
called a terminal, which is just a
communicator to the
mainframe. It’s not the terminal
that does the work, it’s the
host. That help?”
“Sort of. What’s a session?”
Jeez, had she written these
terms down?
“Let me try to explain this in
non-technical terms, Mom.
Imagine that you have two
windows, OK? Now, through
one of the windows you can
talk to the host. Every time you
use that window you’re
communicating to the host and
to the host exclusively.
Through the other window you
can talk to your personal
computer and tell it to run a
program or whatever. Now,
imagine that you can only see
and use one window at a time,
and that by pressing a key you
can change the active window.
If you call each window a
session, then you basically
have Entry Emulator. See?”
“Kind of. If it’s called an
emulator, what is it
emulating?”
She was definitely writing
this down.
Page 2/At Ease/Thursday, Oct. 20,1988
“When you run EE, your
computer acts like an IBM
3278 terminal.”
“Oh. Well, what does that
Workstation thingy do?”
"What are you doing,
writing this down?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well, that Workstation
‘thingy’ acts in much the same
way that Entry Emulator does,
but it can have up to six PC
sessions and four host sessions.
You can also shrink the
windows so that you see more
than one session at a time, but
you can still only interact with a
single session. Anything else,
Mrs. Pulitzer?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. If
you can have up to ten sessions
going at once, does that mean
that you can run ten programs
at once?”
“Not with our current
standard operating system, but
there’s a new operating system
that will let you. Is it OK if we
talk about multi-tasking next
week, Mom? I’m getting kind of
tired. ”
“That’s fine, Dear.”
It wasn’t until I got off the
phone that it occurred to me
that I had just answered for my
mom some of the exact same
questions that I had had during
the first week. It also occurred
to me that I would never stop
asking those questions,
because that was the type of
job this was. The answer to one
question opened the door to
two or three realizations and a
least that many more
questions.
The scariest part was that I
was really beginning to enjoy
this.
This week’s Attention!!
article was written by Kevin
McCabe, a junior computer
science major.
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