Donal Got a Job

A Work in Progress
38

So, Donal auditioned got a job in New York.

Bruce Choppin was there, John Hall

The Who performed Tommy at The Filmore East

when Donal lived in Northumberland

at Roughside Bruce visited with Rachel

only a few did that

It was 1969

Gilbert Peaker got mugged on Morningside Heights

having flown to New York from the Lake District

and the Fast Fourier Transform man

John Tukey lay with a bad back

across desks at an IEA (UNESCO) meeting

Forrest Baskett was there from Stanford

Bruce brought together mathematicians     

    statisticians     

           computer scientists 

      Donal 

                            a poet in machine language 

                                    for a mighty

                     machine

               IBM’s 360/91

Forrest said Assembly Language was too low level

impractical for IEA 

                                instead

he would choose FORTRAN

to write programs that involved scoring exam results

of multiple-choice questions marked on cards pre-punched

with the codes for country school and student

collected from all the countries participating in the study

to measure educational attainment at various ages

and that was wise advice from a Silicon Valley savant

but Donal wrote the programs in Assembler anyway

he didn’t know Fortran and there was one particular

subroutine he wrote in Assembler in Sweden 

working with Britt at the Karolinska Institute

where they read all the cards into a special machine

that invoked an Execute instruction that proved useful

Britt said in a postcard later

    Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025