Just a Little Walk Down Memory Lane, Techy Style (illustrated)

1966 was the year I graduated from high school and started a quick career at San Jose State College. Like all well-intentioned, middle class college students of that time, I looked for a good, part time job to make college life just a little bit easier. To find such a job, I’d meander over to the “placement” office just a block east of the new student union a couple of times a day. The recipe cards that they posted with job descriptions would be updated every few hours. In those days, computers were only huge mainframes for the military or large insurance companies. No one had even thought of anything in the slightest way close to a “personal” computer of today. Records were kept on note cards and lined paper in three-ring binders, those in endless file cabinets.

One lucky day, I found a card where someone needed a “test subject.” There had been rumors floating around the campus that some special companies were paying guys to take acid (LSD) as test subjects. This little job card I held was intriguing, hmmm, “test subject?”

I got the job at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) on Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park, California. Being a provincial farm boy, every thing out in the urban reality was new and interesting, but SRI was just sort of strange from the very start, a little strange to everyone. I was told to report to the main reception area to get an interview. It was a new and modern style building but as you walked down one the hall of its joining wings with a glass wall, outside you could see other buildings that were rusted Quonset huts, small pre-fabbed ammo sheds and all sorts of weird, dismantled equipment piled in stacks all over the place, rising about a tall man’s head high. And like the one I was in, there were new, modern buildings strewn in between. It had a strange, disoriented, juxtaposed feel about it. But that made it interesting. I was anxious to find out what this place was all about.

 The woman who was walking me through this maze was attractive, well spoken, while she wasn’t in a rigid uniform or anything like that, she wasn’t dressed informally. She was a very comfortable and friendly person who had a really nice smile which made me like her right from the start. Back in those days, I would have called her middle-aged, probably in her early to mid 30s. Her name was Carole and, eventually, we became very good friends.

Carole worked for Ph.D doctors who were very specialized and taught eye doctors at Berkeley and Stanford and the medical center up in San Francisco. They were doing “pure research” which didn’t mean a thing to me at the time except that it made me think of atom bombs. The test they were talking about was pretty much nothing. They shot a beam of light into your eye that reflected back off of your retina and they measured this light with computer equipment. She showed me one of the three rooms where they ran the tests. Carole didn’t realize that I’d been playing with radios and movies camera since . . . 

(click here to read the conclusion)