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.
Further Reading
"The Telephone as a Computer Input-Output Terminal for Medical Information," Journal of the American Medical Association," by Scot Allen and Michael Otten, April 28, 1969.
"An audio input-output computer system for medical information", ACM '69 Proceedings of the 1969 24th national conference, Michael Otten, Scott I. Allen, Perry Plexico, William C. White
"Intermediate Languages for Automatic Language Processing," Software Engineering, Computer and Information Sciences - 1969 (COINS III), Vol. 2, by Michael Otten and Milos Pacak, 1971.
"An Experimental Computer Network for Medical Data Processing," Methods of Information in Medicine #8:113-20, by William White, Michael Otten, et al, 1969.
Medical Language Processing , Etudes de Linguistique Appliquee #4, Didier, Paris,1970.
"IBM: Ordering Midrange Computers in Europe," Harvard Business School case study by HBS Professor Andrew McAfee and Michael Otten, 2004.
