My Life [4]

I become a computer programmer

By Jim Rix

Following my stint as a high school mathematics teacher, I took a job at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, in Sunnyvale, and began a career in computer programming. After seven months at Lockheed, I was offered a better position at Tymshare, Inc., another computer company. Tymshare transferred me to Seattle, Washington. That lasted a few years, after which I was laid off and sold furniture for a while at Levitz Furniture. I don’t think I had realized how versatile I could be.

    I wasn’t that bad a salesman, but sales weren’t my thing. In the early 1970s, I secured a programming position at the University of Washington, in its Oceanography Department. It was there I honed my programming skills. Off-the-shelf tools like Excel weren’t available yet, so I wrote a database system for the Interactive Real-time Information System, a research group funded by the National Science Foundation that involved several universities engaged in studying coastal upwelling – the phenomenon whereby offshore winds drive warm surface waters out to sea, to be replaced by nutrient-rich, deep, colder waters. Upwelling is important for fisheries, so when offshore winds fail to materialize, upwelling fails (a condition known as El Niño) and fisheries suffer. Another effect of El Niño is severe weather inland (great for skiers, though).

    For IRIS, I participated in several research cruises off the coasts of Los Angeles, Baja California, Peru (twice), and the west coast of Africa. We left for Africa from the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on the oceanography research vessel Atlantis II and crossed the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, where upwelling research off the coast of Mauritania was staged. It took about a week to cross the Atlantic, as I remember, and the first three days were quite rough. I had never been so sick in my life. Sailing didn’t seem to be my forte.
    In the late 1970s, my boss at the University of Washington relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area as Dean of Science at San Francisco State University. I followed and worked for IRIS for another two or three years. When IRIS wound down I looked into working as a programmer on contract, because the possibility of earning a good livelihood as a contract programmer had come to my attention.

Copyright © 2020 by Jim Rix