Cyndie Zikmund - Author



Creative nonfiction + real world wisdom. My beginnings were rough. My path was unlikely. Now writing the stories I once needed to hear.

For the Love of Tech

Photo: In front of a Data General Eclipse Minicomputer 1980-ish.

I was nineteen going on thirty when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978. In some ways, I was wise beyond my years. My job was to install and repair Computed Tomography Total Body (CT/T) scanners for hospitals around the Bay. Like a doctor, I wore a pager so I could be reached anywhere at anytime. But in other ways, I was as immature as a teenager. I still ate canned frosting for breakfast, drank beer with tomato juice, and hated going to bed at night.

General Electrical Medical Systems sent me to their training headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for nine weeks to learn the job. Nine weeks was a long time to be away from a home that I had barely made for myself. I was still sleeping in my Coleman sleeping bag thrown on top of reclaimed packing foam. But my hotel room at Milwaukee's Red Robin Inn was a step up. It had a bed and a nightstand.

From eight to five, a dozen field service repairmen and me gathered in the classroom for morning lecture. In the afternoon, we performed lab exercises to demonstrate what we had learned and eventually be awarded the all-important Certificate of Completion. They gave each of us a set of manuals bounded in three-ring binders that could fill two bookshelves. These CT/T bibles held answers to every possible question we’d have in the coming years but that we would never again open after our first week back.

Minicomputers were all the rage. I met my first one in the GE classroom across the street from the Red Robin Inn. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was credited with having the first successful, mass produced minicomputer, a member of their PDP series. Since the spelled-out name is laborious, I'll stick with PDP. Everyone does.

After dancing every night in the hotel's disco, we drank vats of Folgers coffee during the day to stay awake through hours of instruction. I'm exaggerating only a little to say that, other than learning how to dance to the Bee Gee’s "Stayin' Alive" and the Village People’s "Y.M.C.A.," I remembered only one thing from that fall:

How to use a Bootstrap Loader to start up a DEC PDP.

The short version is, it’s tedious. The longer version is, it’s exhilarating.

Photo of a DEC PDP ad in the Computer History Museum

I got on my knees or sat on a short stool such that I was at eye level with the row of toggle switches that comprised the PDP’s front panel. For each instruction, I entered two things into the switches, 1) the memory address, and 2) the machine instruction. I did this for all fourteen commands, trying not to make a mistake that would force me to begin again. Then I pressed the START button.

That’s when the magic happened.

Up until this point, the minicomputer was dumb to the world. But after pressing START, the program told it how to find more instructions from the tape drive. Like a treasure hunter, the computer had only enough information to guide it to the next post. After accessing all fourteen locations, it found the pot of gold. Or, in this case, the computer came to life with all the apps needed to generate a diagnostic image.

Imagine having to do this to your laptop or iPhone each time you wanted to use it. Through the miracle of engineering, Bootstrap Loaders are now part of the hardware or firmware and invisible to the user.

This start-up process reminded people of how a self-made “(wo)man” pulled herself up by her own bootstraps. In computer lingo, the PDP had pulled itself up into a powerful machine that controlled a complex X-ray system by starting with a simple step-by-step set of directions.

It seemed entirely appropriate and incredibly fortuitous to have learned about Bootstrap Loaders this early in my career. Otherwise, what would I have called my memoir?

Software Program for My Twenty-year-old-self

Photo from the 1980s.

START: Consider how you want your life to un- / fold;

WHO will you love? | the father figure? OR the rebel?

CHOOSE: father figure;

Love out of season withers un- / fed;

WAIT for / long for / lost calendar pages;

\\ Continue to: CHOOSE AGAIN;

CHOOSE AGAIN: rebel;

Late nights / under- \ currents / drift- \ wood

WAIT for- / ever / to find smooth water; 

\\ Continue to: DO THIS FIRST;

DO THIS FIRST:

/ youhaveto / learnto / loveyour- / self

/ beforeyou / canlove

/ anyone / else;

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Originally published by Writing in A Woman's Voice.

Take Pride

This newsletter celebrates love. Whether your love is for a person (binary or non) or for a retro computer, passion provides the reason to embrace each day with vigor and joy.

Here's to celebrating all the colors of the rainbow and finding your pot of gold.



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