Glenn Davis

Although I never worked directly for Glen, I got into computing because of him and I have worked happily for 28 years in jobs that he created. Like others, I was very lucky to be in the right place (North Hall) at the right time. The right time for me was when TRW was looking for someone to add a feature to the Online System to help allocate costs to individual projects that used the system. Chuck Loepkey and Glen recommended me to Arthur D. Little, Inc. who hired me to write the program.

Mike McCammon and Curt Lemmon introduced me to CRL conventions and Basic Assembler Language on the 360/50. After a year or so, Curt left to take a job in England and his position as manager of the production version of the Online System became available. I took that job on the day after Glen left to start Culler-Harrison, Inc., so I guess that makes me the holder of the first job in the second wave of jobs created by Glen at UCSB.

CRL staff were responsible for my success (survival) as OLS production manager. I know I taxed their patience as I struggled to provide a reliable computing service based on hardware and code that changed every time I went home to sleep. Ed Faeh was particularly helpful to me during this period and was always willing to explain why some module or another behaved as it did. One particularly memorable time was the day after I published a Computer Center newsletter attributing various OLS outages to perceived causes. Roland Bryan demonstrated extraordinary patience and good humor as he gently explained the difficulty my article caused him with some of the folks at BBN, Inc.

Over the years I have elected to stay with UCSB, the Computer Center and IS&C, the umbrella organization which now includes the Computer Center along with the Information Systems Office and Communications Services. As time passed, the Computer Center evolved from heavy support for research to a mostly instructional facility and, more recently, to an administrative support unit. Nevertheless, the Communications Services branch of IS&C finds ways to remain involved with research, most recently via an ATM Technology Trial and a joint research project with CalTrans. (Do you remember the Highway System in the early seventies?) At present we run three separate "online" systems, each with about 1500 customers. We also have about 4500 telephone customers, a voice-mail system and a variety of smaller servers and networks. Quite a change from sixty OLS users and quite a legacy from Glen, the original Computer Center Director.

Even though the Computer Center now supports mostly production administrative applications rather than research, some of the original spirit that Glen brought to UCSB survives. Glen-isms such as, "Wouldn't it be nice if..." and "Be careful what you ask for." can still be heard at meetings. And, yes, we still "adjust" the operating systems from time to time to make things fit together in ways that were overlooked by the vendors.

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