First-Hand:Michael Otten Recollections

I've had a few tangential contacts with the history of computers, having landed as a high schooler a summer job at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory in 1959, which was then located at 115-116th Street, associated with Columbia University. I had written to Tom Watson, Jr. to request a job, and he had me interviewed at 590 Madison in the Board Room by a then ~40 years associate, as there were apparently no other high school students applying for such a job in those days! I learned to program their IBM 650 computer, and a few years later was able to acquire an IBM patch panel along with some surplus Bell Labs solid-state logic devices, which I used to make a small laboratory computer at Columbia (in 1965) as a Masters degree project to demonstrate the problem of computer pulse 'critical races.' I was told that the Electrical Engineering department used this as a teaching tool in subsequent years. In 1964, I again had a summer job with IBM, this time as a Systems Engineer installing one of the first System/360s at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC.

I reference in 'further reading' publications on computer applications in conjunction with telephone technology, which I co-authored in 1969 while at the National Institutes of Health. I believe these were among the earliest works that gave examples how the computational, logic and data base capabilities of computers could be applied to medicine.

First-Hand:Michael Otten Recollections

Further Reading