Virginia Tech Department of Chemical Engineering
VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE 133 Randolph Hall, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0211
AND STATE UNIVERSITY (703) 231-6631 Fax: (703) 231-5022
April 23, 1998
TO: Su Clausen <sclaus@vt.edu>
FROM: Peter Rony <rony@vt.edu>
SUBJECT: Microprocessor Education at Virginia Tech during the 1970s
WELCOME
I am enormously pleased that you, and Virginia Tech Magazine, plan to check the historical details associated with Virginia Tech’s pioneering role in microprocessor education. Both Dr. Jonathan A. Titus -- the hardware creator -- and I -- the laboratory book creator -- played important roles internationally.
In preparation for our meeting at 3:00 PM in my office, Randolph 142B, this morning I have made a first pass -- in my basement catacombs -- at identifying historical documents and books that are relevant. I have several plastic crates of this stuff, and I will bring what I just found to my office today.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE 1970s
When you, as a historian and editor, think back to the 1970s, you should try to understand the “information technology” conditions that existed at that time. There were no Apples or IBM PCs or Macintoshes by the mid-1970s. For the creation of memos, manuscripts, and books, the electric typewriter (e.g., IBM Selectric II) was the word processor, without the processing. The IBM mainframe was situated behind glass windows in Burruss Hall. As a faculty member, you rarely asked how the mainframe worked, and the mainframe gurus rarely told you their secrets. At the time, the people’s computer happened to be Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) minicomputers -- the PDP-8 and the PDP-11 . Unfortunately, DEC felt no obligation to teach its ultimate [customers]; [the] literature that DEC provided assumed that you had two years of courses in an Electrical Engineering department. To a novice, the DEC literature was not only useless, but aggravating.
DEC MINICOMPUTERS: HOW DO YOU INTERFACE THEM?
In 1973, the Chemical Engineering department purchased, for perhaps $15,000, a PDP LAB/8E minicomputer for interfacing to research lab experiments. I remember sitting in front of the computer many times trying to understand how to use it. One or two years later, I purchased a PDP 11/10 for my funded research projects. It came with a teletypewriter -- a very clunky printer -- and also a more modern, digital tape deck. Again, I was not very successful in learning how to interface the PDP 1 1/10 to equipment. At the time, I did not understand what an “operating system” did. Today, tens of millions of people understand what the Windows 95 operating system is all about. Digital Equipment Corporation told me to reconfigure their operating system from a teletypewriter printout to a digital tape deck save. I had no idea how to do it, so I asked my graduate student, Gamal Amer, to do the job for me. He tried for several days, and gave up in frustration. The PDP 11/10 was never used by me owing to my inability to understand how to interface it,
ELECTRONICS FOR SCIENTISTS COURSES IN CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT
In December 1972, Professor Wayne Bennett (EE) and Professor Gerry Beyer (ChE) jointly offered a brief, College-of -Engineering, short course on computer interfacing. The material was entirely new to me, and it catalyzed my interest in hands-on computers. During spring 1973, I signed up as a chemistry graduate student and took two courses (pass/fail): (1) Electronics for Scientists (taught by Instructor David Larsen in Chemistry), and (2) Minicomputer Interfacing (taught by Professor Raymond Dessy in Chemistry). I should have taken these two courses for a letter grade; I worked diligently and probably would have received two A grades. Course (1) substantially improved my knowledge of basic, analog electronics, but it taught me nothing about digital electronics. In Course (2), Professor Dessy had a laboratory workbook for experiments with a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer.
A NEW APPROACH TO LABORATORY DIGITAL ELECTRONICS EDUCATION
By 1973, the chemical engineering department was engaged in a revision of a quite outdated curriculum. At the time, I was the champion for the idea that all of our undergraduates should take a course in instrumentation electronics. We made arrangements for Assistant Professor Tom Kabaservice to teach such a course during the fall 1973 quarter, but when Sepember 1973 arrived, Tom had already left the EE department. We were not informed of his departure. The EE department had Professor Skutt give a “transistor biasing” course to our ChE junior undergraduates. Never known to suffer in silence, our juniors made a big stink about the course with our department head, Henry McGee. In January 1974, at a faculty meeting, I assumed responsibility for the debacle, and proposed that I would figure out what to do even if I had to teach the course myself
I immediately went to David Larsen and inquired if he would be willing to teach an “Electronics for Scientists” laboratory course to all of our chemical engineering undergraduates (about 40 - 50 students per year at that time). He said yes, but indicated that he would need to purchase several additional Malmstadt-Enke laboratory sessions (sic) [stations] in order to handle so many students. Price tag: $5000 per lab station, a total of $15,000 from the ChE department. When I approached (February 1974) the ChE faculty with these amounts, they rejected the expenditure.
I went back to the drawing board. I returned to David and told him that the Malmstadt-Enke laboratory stations were much to (sic) [too] expensive for the ChE department budget. Further, I informed him that we had a choice of three significant alternatives in an “electronics for scientists” course:
Alternative 1 . Power electronics, which I took as an undergraduate in 158 (sic) [1958]
Alternative 2. Instrumentation electronics (which I never took as a course, and taught myself during graduate school)
Alternative 3 . Digital electronics and digital computers (which I still did not understand)
I recommended to David that we teach Alternative 3 to ChE undergraduates, but that we do so at a low cost per laboratory station. [2009 NOTE: I am mistaken here. I first wrote experiments around the E&L Instruments, Inc. Digi-Designer trainer for my spring 1974 ChE students. David’s idea of Outbards came late in spring 1974.] At that time, David came up with an absolutely superb idea: “Outboards”, small and simple electronic circuit boards that each provided a specific digital function and would attach directly to an E&L Instruments, Inc. white, solderless breadboard (which became available commercially in the early 1970s). The value of this idea was its low cost -- a complete undergraduate digital electronics lab station was available for $19 for the solderless breadboard, $1.50 for a lantern battery, and about $35 for a set of digital Outboards. In comparison, existing digital trainers -- e.g., the Digital Equipment Corporation trainer, were elaborately packaged and expensive at between $500 and $3000 per trainer.
[2009 NOTE: I am completely mistaken here. We did not test all of David’s Outboards on my spring-quarter 1974, chemical-engineering students.] We tested the Outboards-and solderless-breadboard approach on a small group of 15 ChE CO-OP students during the winter or spring semester of 1974 . I wrote eleven (11) step-by-step experiments for these students. These experiments were the beginning of my Bugbook series of books.
IBM SHORT COURSE
The IBM Analytical Department in East Fishkill, New York, asked us, in May 1974, to teach a short course, late in the summer, on interfacing their equipment. We taught a 5-day course; the entire analytical department including the manager attended our course. IBM outsourced the responsibility for the course to us because nobody within the company would give them any assistance. With the August deadline, I created several Bugbooks:
Bugbooks I and II -- on digital integrated circuit chips
Instructor’s Workbook for Bugbooks I and II
Bugbook IIA -- on asynchronous serial interfacing techniques.
I used my personally owned Selectric typewriter to create these books. Copies were printed at Southern Printing in Blacksburg directly from my typewritten originals. E&L Instruments, Inc., of Derby, Connecticut paid for the printing costs and then proceeded to market the books to a variety of educational institutions. The books were immediately successful.
EVOLUTION OF THE BOOKS
Books based upon typewritten originals: Bugbooks I and II and IIA(1974), III (August 1975), V and VI (Modules in March 1976, full books in May 1977).
Books typeset by Howard W. Sams, Inc. in Indianapolis -- all of my books, starting in 1978 [2009 NOTE: The correct year is 1977].
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Peter Rony -- professor of chemical engineering during the 1970s and beyond
David Larsen -- instructor in chemistry during the 1970s and beyond
Jonathan A. Titus -- chemistry graduate student during the 1970s
Christopher A. Titus -- chemistry graduate student during the 1970s; brother of Jonathan
Rony, Larsen, and Jonathan Titus created a microprocessor education company, Nanotran, in Blacksburg and later brought Christopher Titus aboard as a full partner. The Titus brothers handled the business aspects of the company; my only repsonsibility (sic) [responsibility] was to write laboratory textbooks. We also created a second company, Tychon. We worked together for five years starting in 1975, at (sic) [after] which time I asked to leave both companies and to regain full author and copyright control of my books.
Raymond Dessy -- professor of chemistry during the 1970s; may now be retired