The Troll Hole Adventure

Summary

When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN and had been having a miserable time, not due to FORTRAN itself, but due to student experiences in using punch cards: Returning to the motivation for this system, let it be noted that anyone who has taught a symbolic system to beginning programmers is aware that syntax and logical errors abound in the programs they produce. One can visualize the standard scene in a [IBM] 1620 installation: a group of students loading the assembler, loading and unloading the punch hopper, entering the object deck, watching the typewriter anxiously, and then staring in increasing bewilderment at a machine which has halted, cleared or is in an infinite loop. Lochner was integral to helping develop Dartmouth’s legendary time-sharing system, where a large computer could have its time divided into slices, and multiple users could then access the same machine simultaneously using terminals (as opposed to slow batch punch cards and their resulting infinite loops). Notably he developed “communication files” which were essentially an early version of UNIX pipes, gluing together the output of one operation/command to become the input of another. As Lochner wrote in an article describing Dartmouth’s progress, “The main purpose for developing the System was to provide for teaching computing to almost all Dartmouth students, including those concentrating in the Social Sciences and Humanities. A second purpose was to tap the hitherto unrealized wealth of small computer problems related to the everyday research activities of a college faculty, small problems that would never be initiated if the turn-around time were as long as a single day.” The explosion of computing at Dartmouth that followed led to a fair number of important early programs that later showed up in David Ahl’s books like ANIMAL, but for...