134 Dahlgren 



him mad because those were traditional titles that craftsmen had some feelings 

 for. To us and some other people, they didn't mean a thing. I think we did get 

 the classification problem straightened out to where people finally became 

 known for what they were doing and not for some side issue that they just did 

 not fit into. 



In programming, there were two or three of us hired. Two of us were hired at 

 Harvard, and a couple at Dahlgren. There wasn't such a big problem in the 

 beginning because the computers were pretty slow, relatively speaking, and we 

 could keep up with them, but as the staff expanded, we had to figure out how to 

 get programmers from colleges because at this point, no one was teaching 

 programming. None of the colleges had any computers, so we made a decision 

 to hire mathematicians and train them to do the programming. I think that has 

 been a blessing to us in two ways. The mathematicians are flexible enough now 

 so that they can move to other jobs. We could have hired people who were not 

 mathematicians and tried to teach them to program. In some business applica- 

 tions, we did that, but by hiring professional mathematicians we were able to 

 train them on the computers. They also had a career ahead of them, and they 

 could move to other kinds of work such as in weapons systems. 



At that time, we didn't have any educational program here. We didn't have 

 college courses being offered on Station, but the professional people that we 

 had felt a definite need to stay up to date with what was going on, technologi- 

 cally. I remember even organizing groups of people that would take certain 

 textbooks and each person would read a chapter and give something like a book 

 review. We'd meet after work and talk to each other and explain what was in 

 that particular chapter. That's the way we tried to stay up to date. Now, we have 

 a fine educational program, and we don't have that problem. 



I guess one of the management problems that we haven't solved completely is 

 that computers are used for all sorts of programs, but there is no single office in 

 Washington we can go and talk with about getting money to do R&D in the 

 programming area. The money that keeps computers going comes from vari- 

 ous projects. The project people want work done, but they don't want to 

 sponsor any research on computers or programming languages. There is a lot 

 of efficiency to be gained by improving our methods, but you have to have 

 money to do that. We did work it out to some extent because in our computer 

 hourly rate we have a surcharge, sort of an overhead, that we use to pay people 

 to do some of these things which benefit everyone. This type of work takes place 

 in our Systems Group, DK-70. They do things to improve programming 

 systems and languages and determine the most efficient systems or methods. 

 We still don't have a central office in Washington to support that kind of 

 programming, but we are seeing an organization get started now called the 

 Computer Science Technology Program, and I think that NAVELEX will 

 eventually have that responsibility. So we see some things changing. 



