John Vilandre

Quotes

JV: I arrived at the LPH in the fall of 1963. My first job was in data processing, working for the lab’s statistician Norris Schulz. Most data came to us handwritten on forms from field workers or from laboratory workers. Small data sets were often processed by entering the variables, two at a time, directly into mechanical calculating machines. These calculators were able to accumulate sums and calculate sums of squares and cross products of the two variables. Those values were used to compute descriptive statistics such as means, standard deviations, and correlation coefficients. The Monroes and Friedens were first hand-operated but by the time I arrived they were electric.

HB: I remember Ancel Keys working with those, cranking away in a very busy sound.

JV: Yes, we still had a couple of hand-operated machines but the ones I used were electric. Unfortunately, as has happened with each succeeding generation of equipment, when the new things came in, the old ones were discarded; it seemed, “What’s the point of keeping it if no one is going to use it anymore?” It would have been nice to keep 1 of each.

These mechanical machines placed practical limitations on the sizes of studies because someone had to sit there and add up all those data by hand and do the squares. And, of course, if you have a column of 100 or more numbers and punch it in twice, you are often going to come up with different answers. So you must do it a third time to get the thing rectified.

I think the calculators were limited, too, just because of the shear time it would take to do a study on thousands of people, as we easily do now, Eventually a common technique for handling large samples was to use card-sorting machinery to order the cards on a particular variable, then determine quartile, quintile, decile or centile cut points to use as entry values for the calculating machines. Rose Hilk can tell you the story of the time there was a huge card sort going on and we had a large bin on the wall that held the cards as they came out in order. Dr. Keys was eager to get this analysis done so he came in on a week-end and did some more sorting, but at one point the whole bin came crashing down off the wall. He had to start all over.

The LPH had a pre-printed form developed by Dr. Keys which could be used as a guide through the steps necessary to compute the various statistics.

HB: But you had to understand the process.

JV: Yes, which was a very good thing. The basics of statistical methods were taught me by Jaako Kihlberg, visiting from Finland, who had a great capacity for explaining the foundations for the statistical tools we were using.

HB: Now you just punch a button.

JV: Right, put it in SAS and get a number out. Sometimes, unfortunately, I think people don’t even know if their chosen statistic is the appropriate one to use. Anyway, that’s why we have statisticians to check the work. Basically, still true today, we human beings are the single weakest point — because we make errors.

Having the data on punch cards allowed us to begin to utilize computers for data analysis. At first, in the early 1960s, cards were carried to the Mutual Service Insurance Co. in St. Paul for analysis on its Univac. As the University began to acquire central computing facilities, such as the Control Data 3300, we started to use those machines as well. Drawers full of punch cards were transported across Washington Avenue from the Stadium to the 3300 site beneath the VFW hospital.

Use of these machines also triggered the first of many data conversion projects; the University machines read only IBM-style, 80-column punch cards and LPH had been using Remington Rand, 90-column (round hole) cards (compatible with the Univac). Rose Hilk can fill you in on the process she used to make the transformation. I believe much of that was done at a service bureau on University Avenue near Prospect Park.

At the Mutual Service Insurance Company in St. Paul, where you were consultant medical director and where Bill Parlin was actuary and data manager, we got our first computing experience, but outside the Lab. No computers were available to us internally yet.

HB: I remember the big demonstration we put on in 1962 at MSI for the visiting overseas dignitaries who were enroute to the Mexico City World Congress of Cardiology, basically showing off how we were in the forefront of analysis capability in CVD epidemiology.

The LPH gets its own computer

JV: I mention Bill Parlin, too, because he was largely instrumental in bringing the first computer ever to Physiological Hygiene, the Digital Equipment Company’s PDP 8. I can’t remember the exact year but it must have been around 1963-64, somewhere in there. That machine might be interesting to note. Everyone has a computer these days and we talk about megabytes and gigabytes of memory. That machine had 4 kilobytes of memory! It had no storage device of any kind except paper tape which isn’t really internal. There was no disk drive, no tape drive, no CRT. Each time you ran a program you had to load it in from the paper tape and the numbers were punched out on a teletype machine of the kind used by the news media in those days to send messages. With its attached paper tape punch, it allowed programs and data to be stored for later use. HB: I remember you sitting at that machine in the Stadium hall.

JV: We were in the little alcove in the hallway.

HB: I am embarrassed at my then lack of curiosity over your operation. It just knew it was beyond me.

Programming

Bill Parlin became our pioneer computer programmer. The first thing that he did was to write a little piece of code called a “handler” (today we call them “drivers”) that would interface a card-reading machine with the computer. So now we could actually read the numbers from the punch cards into our computer. You couldn’t store anything. All the statistics were done by numbers stored in memory for that run only. When you turned the machine off you had to start all over. So, although the PDP 8 allowed us to perform some data analysis in-house, its limitations (small memory, no internal data storage) meant that larger problems still needed to be taken outside. But that’s where I learned computers; sitting around in the evenings watching Parlin. He showed me how to do machine-language programming because, with such a limited amount of memory, if you tried to use Fortran (first of all the only Fortran compilers available were rudimentary) it would create code that was quite inefficient. So if you really wanted to get the maximum use of those 4,000 units of PDP memory you had to write using the computer’s basic instruction set. It was great fun, much like doing puzzles.

HB: And then came the PDP 12?

JV: Yes, when LPH moved into Moos Tower in 1973, the PDP 8 was replaced by a PDP 12. That was a nice little machine. It had an auxiliary hardware floating-point number processor. Today, such a processor is an integral part of any PC computer chip, but then, it was a six-foot tall cabinet full of cards with resistors and capacitors—just to do basic multiplication and division. This computer provided us also for the first time, magnetic disk (2.5 megabyte) and magnetic tape. Now we could exchange data with certain other places and make back-ups of the things we were doing. Although it permitted more sophisticated programming, it was still a single-user machine and the department was growing rapidly as your new studies came in to the Lab. So we had to work in shifts. Since I was a single person, I often worked the night shift. So I would be going home at 3 or 4 in the morning and stop at Mama Rosa’s on the West Bank. I still remember and wish that I could get their pecan waffles. David Jacobs, Peter Hannan, Al Wommelsdorf, and I were the main computer users. Judy Baxter did some programming, also. But soon, even 24-hour scheduling of computer time became insufficient to meet the demands.

Multi-user Computing

We got our first multi-user system in Moos Tower, I think in 1978. I think I still have some of the old price quotes from when we purchased the PDP 11/34. Now we had larger disk drives that held 80 megabytes of data. Each disk drive was a separate, floor-standing unit, about the size of a small dishwasher. When you think of what’s in your little laptop now it seems crazy. But the nice thing about the PDP 11 was its capacity for multiple, concurrent users. I think we had initially four terminals and that expanded as we moved into several generations of PDP 11s.

HB: I can’t picture the terminals in my mind.

JV: They were very similar to what you have here right now in the data entry shop. Just a TV screen (CRT) and a keyboard. There was no graphics capability at all; it was just able to echo characters back from what you typed into the computer. But this allowed us to start doing direct key-to-disk data entry and to bypass punch cards. Rose Hilk then was in charge of the data entry shop; Mary Duehring took over later, followed by Pat Brothen.

The second massive data media conversion, this time from punch cards to magnetic tape, was performed during this period. We had literally millions of punched cards by the mid 1970s. Rose Hilk, over a period of months, fed the cards through a reader attached to a computer and then we stored the data on magnetic tape. We had big bins in the hallway to dump the cards into once they had been read. When the card stock was sold to a recycling company, we got enough money to buy a microwave for the kitchen.

The PDP-11/34 was replaced by a PDP-11/70 and a PDP-11/44, each of which was just a little faster and had more capacity. These machines formed the nucleus of the first computer network in the division. At one time we were probably supporting 30 or 40 users of these machines and people would notice a significant slowdown in peak times. When your Minnesota Heart Survey started around 1980, funds became available to buy a new kind of computer from the same company, called the VAX, very popular in the 1980s. We had a succession of them and still have some of them today. Of course, I think Jim Huber was one of the first people to bring in one of the original Macintosh computers. He got it to work as a terminal on our VAX. Then a few people started experimenting with PCs and today we have a mix of PCs and Macintoshes. They are working better and better together as advances are made in operating systems and networking.

There was another thing that went on that I was going to mention to you and I had forgotten about until just now. About the same time we got the PDP 8 or shortly after, Dr. Keys got himself a Wang desk top computer and he learned to program it all by himself. I had very little to do with it. I looked at it a few times with him and we puzzled together over how to make it do a few things by reading the manual and so on. He eventually got it attached to an IBM electric typewriter so he could print out and actually operate as the office word processor to do his reports.

HB: What was it that you went to Italy and repaired for him?

JV: There was another set of computers before the IBM PC became so popular. Various computer manufacturers had taken a stab at creating small, personal, desktop units, including Digital that made a computer called The Professional. That was a single user system but it was based on the same operating system that we were running on the PDP 11s so that it was easy for us to move software back and forth from one to the other, including the word processor and spreadsheet program we used then.

HB: How did we use the old University Control Data facility, was that direct wired?

JV: Until we got to the VAX era, our PDP 11s were too small for certain jobs of sorting tens of thousands of records, so we would put data onto magnetic tape or onto computer disks and take them over to the CDC 6600. That was a batch processing system and we took decks of cards sometimes also. You could punch your program onto cards and they would be run through a reader, compiled, and then applied to your data and you could store data there for a fee.

HB: And we did that for several years?

JV: We did that for a long time to supplement the capabilities of the PDP-11s. Some of the jobs that we were running otherwise would have run for days and there on the CDC machine they could run in a matter of hours. Today they run on your own desktop in a few minutes.

A Britton-Lee relational database machine was acquired also. A growing staff of computer programmers and analysts, led by Gordon Weil, began in the early 1980s to establish “data dictionaries.” moving the data for the Minnesota Heart Survey and Minnesota Heart Health Project onto the database machine. They wrote software for data analysts to read data from those databases into the computers. A primary statistical tool at that time was the BMDP analysis package.

About 1985, with computing demand increasing, the first VAX computer, a model 8600 was purchased. This new, 32-bit virtual memory machine, removed most limitations on program size that were inherent in the PDP series. The new processor had sufficient capacity to run a relational database in software, allowing the retirement of the Britton-Lee machine. It also supported the SAS system which quickly supplanted the use of BMDP. The VMS operating system that ran on the 8600 has been updated frequently over the years. It is now supported on newer, high speed, 64-bit RISC processors.

While the longevity of VMS has meant less retraining of programmers and other staff, today most users in the Division use personal computers for the bulk of their work. The VMS systems are service providers, or servers, to the desktop systems, providing data storage, database capabilities, e-mail service, etc. to the end users.

HB: We are an increasingly big, happy, computer capable, but demanding family of faculty and staff, incessantly requiring servers and services for both PCs and MACS. You have left us a fine legacy and spoiled us badly, John. I know of no academic center with the level of direct and intimate support services for computation and communication that compares to ours.