[GreenKeys] James L. Flanagan

[Jones, Douglas W]

I just read the obit for James L. Flanagan in the NY Times.
-- http://tinyurl.com/ntya98y

Flanagan was head of Department 1227 (Acoustics Research) at
Bell Labs Murray Hill when I worked there in 1973-1974.  In
reading the obit, I noticed that the photo was very familiar.
It shows one of the 3 Honeywell DDP-516-based workstation
consoles they had.  I believe, in fact, that it shows the
console at which I spent most of my time while I worked there.
The photo in the obit was released in Nov. 1970 by Bell
Labs as Photo No. 6-4-16 with this caption:

> WORD MERCHANTS -- Bell Laboratories scientists R. W. Schafer,
> J. L. Flanagan, and L. R. Rabner (left to right) listen to
> synthetic speedh produced by their new technique that uses
> only one fiftieth the amount of digital information previously
> needed for computer generated speech.  Schafer (foreground)
> controls the graphic representaitons of synthetic speech
> patterns displayed on the screen to his left.  Synthetic
> spech, produced in this manner, may one day provide
> information for people who dial telephone numbers that have
> been disconnected or changed, or other services such as
> up-to-the-minute weather reports and telephone numbers.

I found the above original text on Larry Rabner's web site:
-- http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Rabiner/ece259/event%20photos.html

Something noteworthy in that photo:  The device in Schafer's
left hand is a mouse -- home-made, with a body milled out of
a block of aluminum, housing a pair of perpendicular optical
shaft encoders inside attached to wheels that stick out of
slots in the bottom cover.

The scope display in the background was hooked to two tracks
on the fixed-head disk, with a controller that interpreted
the data in the tracks as a sequence of, if I recall correctly,
4-bit draw commands (one bit for scope beam on, scope beam
off, one bit for 3 bits to encode move direction, where each
move incremented or decremented the X and Y DAC registers.
The refresh rate was set by the speed of the disk, and the
scope could display either of 2 disk tracks, so you could use
software to update one track while the other was being
displayed, and the switch tracks for clean animation.

The console (between Flannagan's elbow and the scope display)
has knobs for analog input (to the ADCs) and illuminated
push buttons to display and allow setting and clearing of
bits in the CPU registers.

Not visible in the photo are the other peripherals on the
DDP-516:  A high-speed paper-tape reader (60 bytes/sec) and
a card reader.  The CPU and disk drives are all to the right
outside the photo.  I don't know if they had the wet-process
electrostatic line printer yet when that photo was taken (a
Tektronics product).

The shelf above contains audio components for speech output,
while Larry Rabner is using the console teletype (an ASR 33)
as an arm rest.  It looks like the lab board Ron Schafer is
using is a blank filler panel from a 24-inch Telco relay rack.

When I came to department 1227 in the Summer of 1973, the
teletypes were still there.  We replaced them with Diablo
daisy-wheel printers (much quieter -- a very important
property when you're doing acoustics research).  By then, the
3 workstations and a 4th machine were networked on a
local-area network.  The 4th machine was a disk server
running an array of moving-head disk drives.

		Doug Jones
		jones at cs.uiowa.edu=