FRS 122w Jake Knerr
Joseph H. Condon
Condon was an electrical engineer who used UNIX for circuit analysis. He originally began his career at Bell Labs as a physicist/metallurgist and for political reasons moved into a project that involved UNIX. Condon possessed exceptional technical /research skills; he understood how a computer works, not just how to use it.
It was in the early 1970’s that Condon first encountered UNIX in Division 13 under the supervision of Hank Macdonald . Condon was working on switching circuits in local area networks, and many people in the department were running Honeywell systems with UNIX. He was not interested in UNIX because it was an operating system and his interests lay in programming languages. Condon became much more involved with UNIX after what he called "political/personality" problems caused him to be transferred off of Macdonald’s team and onto a project headed by Sam Morgan. The objective of Morgan’s team was not clearly noted in the interview, but it seemed to involve calculating the power coming out of a telephone line. Although the role of UNIX was unclear, it is clear that UNIX was an important part of the project. UNIX was most likely used as an operating system to design specific programs that would solve circuit problems. For example, if AT&T needed to know how its power grid was being distributed across the telephone networks, a very specific program would be needed to analyze the grid in Trenton. The UNIX environment was most likely being used to design programs that could solve problems such as the one stated above.
Condon used UNIX in a dynamic programming fashion. In the interview he discussed how colleagues would come up his supervisor and ask how the UNIX commands worked. His supervisor would tell them to experiment with commands and figure them out. This, according to Condon, was the philosophy behind UNIX: keep it simple so that one can figure it out without a thick manual. Keeping something simple allows the user to form simple mental models to remember how it functions. This is cognitive engineering; generic solutions to special problems.
The model that Condon brought to computing was a hardware one. When asked by Mahoney what his model of computing was, he responded that he understood the circuitry of a computer and the servos that power the disk drive, etc. This response illustrated how Condon thought in a physical sense. He was, and thought like an electrical engineer as opposed to a programmer. Condon grew up around electronics. He saw the early development of computers, even working on mercury delay lines as a kid. It is obvious in the interview that electronics were his passion, not UNIX because he frequently digressed into discussing the technical details of systems that had no relevance to what Mahoney asked him.
Well I’m much more involved in hardware. Understanding the analog, the digital, and the digital analog conversion problems. All those filters and determine if the right current is flowing or not flowing through the customers line. It’s the sort of system to understand the hardware system that I am interested in.
Clearly Condon saw UNIX as a tool to help him do hardware analysis. He was not a programmer and did not have any interest in UNIX for UNIX’s sake. Condon is the paradigm of the type of person that UNIX was created for because Condon used UNIX to create programs to solve "real" problems.
Condon eventually took over as head of Project 13 and outlined his strategy of effective management. His management outline leans heavily on the pragmatic usage of programs like UNIX because he feels that people needed an infrastructure to do their job. UNIX provided this infrastructure to create the programs to solve problems.
Up near the top of the pyramid, you can’t use all of your people. So, the only other thing to do was to start another pyramid. (Laughing) I had this army of people that keep busy and when it comes time to write up the project, really what did we prove, and what did we find and all that sort of stuff. There are twelve guys out there who can’t contribute to that. They have to be kept busy. The right way to do research is to build the intrastructures such as to make it such that people could do their hardware project and then use it.
The interview finished with Condon talking about how UNIX evolved over time. Because it is an adaptable operating system it accommodated special purpose tools very well, but it is necessary to rid UNIX of unnecessary tools periodically. Failure to rid the system of the excess tools is defeating the philosophy of simplicity that underlines the belief behind UNIX. Excess tools create complexity and this is bad. Another proposed change was a graphical user interface for UNIX. Though, Condon did not see this as applicable to UNIX.
After reading this interview, Joseph H. Condon’s personality was illuminated. It was apparent that he was an arrogant man. He refers to his army of TA’s often and likes to mention how he lent TA’s to colleagues. He even refers to one TA he lent out as a second quartile TA. Only an arrogant man would label a TA as second rate. He judged others’ work very bluntly, and seemed enormously confident in his ideas. He frequently interrupted Mahoney in the middle of a thought or question. All this led me to believe that he is a very confident man who liked things to be done in a certain way. In fact, he left Project 12 because he wasn’t getting along with the supervisor. He wasn’t getting along with his supervisor most likely because the project wasn’t being carried out the way he felt it should. Understanding Condon’s personality may not be important to understanding UNIX, but may be important for interpretation of the interview.
Joseph H. Condon is a hardware man who happened to be around when UNIX was being implemented. He didn’t help create or define UNIX, but he was one of the first people who used UNIX to solve problems.