MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1969 - College Years III

Ames Lab

My halftime job was rather ill defined. I was assigned to work in an electronics group at Ames Laboratory just west of campus. Ames Laboratory had a small nuclear reactor that was basically used as a neutron generator for various physics researchers. I had no real position in the electronics group and they really didn’t know what to do with me. They were all full time non-student employees. I basically followed some of them around trying to figure out what they did and where I could fit in. One of the things I did was to help Dale Anderson with electronic equipment to collect data about the nuclear reactor operation for his PhD dissertation. I also solved a major electronics problem for a group of physicists that were doing crystallography using neutron bombardment on various crystal formations. I eventually wrote software for them that allowed them to pick up where they left off if their equipment or the computer failed during the middle of a long, several days, experiment. The language I was using was called TASK 65. It a version of ALGOL 60 specially modified to include real time functions to be performed based on outside the computer electrical signals for the experiment’s equipment.