In a Rice News article by Katharine Shilcutt, the Woodson and Fondren Library has been working in conjunction with the Rice Media Center to help them preserve their treasures. You can read more about it here.
As the article notes, Interim Director, Amanda Focke, has a few large hard drives in her office that contain a portion of the digitized content. We wanted to show off some of the stills from one of the films entitled Three Rice Engineers (1972). This 16mm documentary created by David Gerth features interviews with John Doerr, Genevieve Howell, and Tom Dydek.
Thank you! 🙂
The “unknown student” shown with John Doerr is Mike Donegan.
Let’s make that Michael Donegan. That thing between John and me was one frame of the R-2, the successor to the Rice Research Computer, which was soon to be referred to as R-1. The construction technique for the R-2 was a bit fragile and the project was abandoned, but we were learned a lot. We all took turns wiring it up. My friend Scott and I were working on the software. Scott designed the programming language, dubbed “New” and I wrote the compiler for it. Randy Neff wrote a simulator for the ALU of the machine so we could code a few instructions, feed it to the computer, and the compare the results to that of the simulator. That was near the end of the project.
The film I would love to see is one starring me. I was walking through the computer center one day and they grabbed me and said, “We want to make a video to show people how to use the keypunch machine.” It was done in one take. But years later I would run into alumni who said they recognized me from watching that video in their beginning programming class. I never saw the result.