so the question the question had something to do with usage of personal computers um
yes we are we are talking about computers this morning
um i'm a firm believer in in having lots of them i'm sitting at my desk now with four machines in front of me
you have you have four machines around you boy well you've uh you've got me beat i have a a Zenith here
um-hum
and at home i have a Commodore
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and a Zenith and my wife has an AT&T 1200 i believe it is
good grief what do you do with all those
well actually on my Commodore i mainly study lottery numbers would you believe i have written some uh programs in basic
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whereby i can select any number of uh drawings and from that extract the numbers that have appeared the most
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right
i have another program in which i can look at the cyclical uh appearance of these numbers
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to see if there's anything that's consistent on that
i have another number that allows me another program that allows me to
add all the numbers i want and then it generates a complete set of numbers so that all combinations are covered
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so this is what i do most of the time uh
that's what you do on your at least one of your machines on your Commodore
on my Commodore on my Commodore um-hum and of course i have uh
word processors and i write all my letters is is wonderful uh my uh thoughts in my head come in bursts of about a paragraph at a time and i get them all down and
yeah
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yes
naturally on a computer if you make a mistake who cares you can go back and uh correct it very easily
yes yes
so that makes it very very nice i get all my thoughts down and go back and clean it up very very readily
so how about you Charles
well i um i do an awful lot of
preparation of documents um uh and i i use
word processors and and fancier programs i mean you know graphics programs and simply make all of our slides um some of them i do on a Sun some i do on an XT
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uh-huh
um now maybe we don't call these personal computers um
i started out with you know an IBM PC back in the
you know about a year after they came out
yeah
and you know
so where where may i ask where you work sir
i i work for the government in Washington
i know you work for the government i just wondering are you a NAVC or what
what what section of it roughly
of in in in an obscure part of the defense department
oh uh-huh because see that's my type of work too i work at the Applied Research Lab here here on campus and
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my my field is underwater acoustics and there's a lot of things we can do with computers into uh studying
uh-huh
how
uh things vary in the water you know and uh taking advantage of them and so forth so it's a very nice very nice field and i i am retiring at the end of this month end of December excuse me
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are are are you are you also a professor or or do you just research
yes
i'm a professor i'm an associate professor but my i my i'm a full time researcher
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yes
and it's uh been a very very interesting career believe me
i can believe what are you gonna what are you gonna do when you stop i mean take all your machines with you or
well
well uh
the ones here in the laboratory obviously i'm they're gonna stay but i have similar machines at home i would consider uh uh doing some more consulting when i get home
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but i have a very very busy extra life anyway i'm also a musician and i play in several symphony orchestras and uh i run a concert band and
yes
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so i have a lot of external uh interests
yes
but i do want to get very deeply much more deeply into computer work because obviously the world is gonna be controlled run and operated by computers in the future there's no doubt about it because it is really taking over
yes
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and the amount of work that we're doing and the depth of things that we are studying can basically only be handled by computers because uh it's so much involved
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and it sounds as though you're probably more aware of that than i am because uh i don't get to use it in my daily work as much as i would like to
here again let's say i'm starting to getting ready in preparation for retirement and uh so basically what i'm doing is
yeah
yeah
slowly getting rid of my things for many many years i had a full size acoustics uh
study laboratory where where i could take recordings and and uh perform experiments with them and so forth and so that's gone now and so i'm sort of out of business
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um
uh as i say i worked with NAVC fellow named Steve Blazey was the fellow i worked with for many many years and he is now retired
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so it's been an interesting life and computers have come in towards the
latter end of that i wish we'd had computers in the very beginning it would have been
