LarryCast.com

Once upon a time, I was a kid barely in high school (in a land far, far, far away). A friend of mine worked at a custom transformer design firm as an estimator and I needed a summer job. I was hired to paint the outside of the building (which is now the APCD building in Kearny Mesa). I even signed my name in the lower right corner if you were to dig up the dirt down a ways.

Once I finished the summer job, they had me come back after school for 2.5 hours a day (riding my bicycle to school, work and home every day) because I had an aptitude for things technical and they needed someone to document transformer design programs that were written on the HP-97 programmable calculator (link here).

These were the days before switching power supplies and transformers were the way to supply different voltages to what was required for a given circuit. A transformer is made up of a stack of ferromagnetic laminations in the shape of an E and an I that are alternately stacked up in a pile through a plastic bobbin. That makes them heavy but the cool thing about a transformer is that they are really efficient, heavy but efficient.

Anyway, at some level, it boils down to copper wire, current capacity and physical size. In the old days you had to do lots of calculator punching to figure out what size of wire on a given size bobbin could carry the current and give you the number of turns required to get the voltage you need for the circuit you are trying to power. The programs I was asked to document automated some of that work for the engineers (having been written by my friend).

Making a long story story longer, that is what started me in my career in IT (information technology). I did the documentation of the programs, even enhancing some of them, and eventually was a junior engineer for a while.

I did odd jobs as well, I remember Pete Jorgensen who was the production manager, having me do various tasks including fixing the industrial stapler machine that stapled the lead wires to the nomex paper that was then soldered to the bobbin wire, or stacking one of the first 150KVA isolation transformers we made. (google on “topaz electronics”, MDI or Powermark for more reading material)
The general manager brought an Apple II into work one day, it ran visicalc (or a clone version called magicalc) that sent the accountants into ecstasy - it added the columns of numbers automatically that previously took a long time on an adding machine to total up the columns. I got very familiar with that machine (pr#7 anyone), ours had a 16K integer card and an 80 column card too - man that was high tech then!
Then I was inducted into the data processing division once the transformer company was folded into the bigger company and ended up as a swing shift HP3000 operator.

Once I left there (what was ultimately Square D Power Protection Systems), I went to Chaparral Computer Systems as a “netdude”, which is a story for another day.

Suffice to say, it’s amazing when you think that my early programmable calculator documentation (go RPN!) is what made it possible for me to have a career in the IT field that keeps food in my and my wife’s stomachs!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.