Reporting to work
I had given Fermilab six weeks notice, and at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, May 3, 1971, I reported to work in my basement. I was determined to not get into lazy habits, and there were some very pressing engineering projects to work on.
In March, 1971, we had purchased---off the floor of a trade show---a DEC rack-mounted PDP-11 that had a paper tape reader and 4 kilobytes of RAM memory that we quickly upgraded to 8 kilobytes. This was 10 years prior the IBM PC, and computers in those days generally resided in fortified, specially air-conditioned spaces into which only certain people could enter. I had dreamed of "someday having my own computer" and, since only companies and organizations could afford computers in those days, this was a driving force to starting a company. It was a huge thrill to have a computer in my basement. Wow!
The company's business was using computers to do high-performance data acquisition and control in real time. We allowed computers to take in accurate data as events were occuring outside the computer and to take actions that cause someting to happen outside the computer based upon the real-time data and the program(s) running in the computer.
My house had been built two years earlier, and I had planned ahead. The basement was the largest in town, was well lit, and had a clean, newly-painted floor. So, with a few tables and an oscilloscope, I went to work. The most pressing project was debugging the CAMAC Branch Driver. This is the device that connected the PDP-11 computer to the CAMAC "crate." More specifically, it connected the PDP-11 bus, called the "Unibus," to the CAMAC Type-A crate controller.