During the Berlin PM Camp, I told the stories of four projects from vintage times that were very important for me. And I also announced here that I was going to publish all four of them in the IF Blog.
So here I am now, beginning with the first small project:
Project #1
The first project of my life was but a small one. It was scheduled to last six weeks and it was my first professional activity in data processing.
In those days, I was a student of informatics starting for the second time. The first time had been in 1969, when I started studying mathematics and minored in informatics at Technische Hochschule München (THM). The only alternatives for the minor subject would have been physics – which I did not like – and business. However, I was a little sceptical, because I had been attending and graduating from the Jacob Fugger “Business Grammar School” in Augsburg. And at that school, accounting, which I was quite good at, had been an A-level subject. On the other hand, the knowledge taught in business and economics seemed a little questionable to me – which, incidentally, is even more true today. Consequently, the only thing to minor in left was informatics – and that sounded really exciting, too. Professor F.L. Bauer actually succeeded in whetting my appetite in the fall of 1969.
And then, on April, 1st, 1970, dark powers and a mixture of ill luck and ill advice forced me to serve in the Federal Army. That was not at all an April’s Fool Jest, which meant that I had to spend 18 months in rather questionable surroundings as a conscript.
And when, late in September 1971, I regained my freedom, I just started anew. Again in the first semester, again with the same combination of subjects, and again at the same college, which suddenly was called TUM (Technische Universität München).
But there was nothing new except the name. And I knew almost everything because in 1969 I had still been a rather diligent student who had listened attentively and learned with enthusiasm. Consequently, I was doing well and the Olympic Games of 1972 came along. Besides studying, I had a great job with good money at the German Railway (at the time still called Deutsche Bundesbahn) as a customer service person for guests from all over the world. And in some way or other, the entire world was mine for the asking …
In 1974, I finished my intermediate diploma successfully and again needed a little more money than I made as a TUM tutor (teaching Linear Algebra I and II and a programming course). I narrowly missed being eligible for BaföG and my parents – also working at the German Railway – said I could easily continue living at home in my room and commute to Munich like my father always did. But that was not what I wanted. Consequently, I was looking for a summer job – and, naturally, the favourite prospective employer was one of the leading high-tech and computer companies.
In those days, that was what Siemens was! Seen in retrospective, it is hard to believe what immense know-how was present in this company in a huge number of areas. They took me in at Siemens and so I was in the middle of the real high-tech world, first for six weeks in the summer of 1974 and then for the entire duration of my university education. I had direct access to computers, operating systems and programming languages – and I mean I was filled up with them to the brim, which was totally different from what they offered, for instance, at the so-called TUM.
And I got my first project at Siemens on my very first day! My (department) boss was Mr. Bieck. He was a hardware person and later became development head at one of the upcoming German computer manufacturers: Kienzle.
Kienzle was only one of the smaller Siemens competitors – but it was certainly remarkable to see what these enterprises – just like much larger enterprises, such as Nixdorf, or many smaller ones managed to accomplish in those days.
During my six weeks as a summer intern, I had total freedom – provided the actual task I had been assigned got finished. And they also told me that the problem I had been given might not be solvable at all. But that it would indeed be very much appreciated if I managed to solve it. It was actually the same I heard over the last few years from people about google: you give yourself unachievable goals, yet you get a nice tolerance for possible failure, which means you will be truly happy when eventually you actually manage to solve the problem.
The task was easy to formulate: The department wanted the highest possible Mersenne prime numbers. For a hardware prototype.
For non-mathematicians:
A number is a Mersenne prime number if it is a prime number derived from a power of two minus 1. In other words if (2 power n) – 1 or (2 power m) – 1, is a prime number.
That is my spontaneous definition.
Well – and my boss wanted as many n-s and m-s as possible. He was not interested in being shown how I did it – as long as I did it at all.
The background:
In those days, a lot of people were really active doing “research and development”. It was truly great. But it was not some R&D totally remote from practice. No: in almost all cases, your work would serve to promote actual applications and projects. That made it truly cool.
Practically applied R&D needs theoretical background. Business got that from the universities (in those days, there was still something you could get from them). And, naturally, Siemens AG also looked across the borders – particularly across the inter-state borders. Because the GDR universities were not so bad at all. And they gave us lots of great results.
For instance, there was a scientific work sitting on my desk – I think it had been written in Leipzig – in which someone had given the theoretical proof that it is possible to build an accidental generator from a ring connection with n binary switches.
And if you short-circuited the structure at the right place, the system would generate a maximum period of random numbers.
It would happen if and only if the number of used switches n is a Mersenne prime number. And if the short-circle is after the m-th switch – and if m is a Mersenne prime number. (please forgive my clumsy description, I was never much of a hardware person).
I never understood this work. Also those six weeks would probably be far too short. But then, this was totally irrelevant for my job. All I was supposed to do was deliver very high prime numbers of the type 2 power n -1. Even the prime numbers were unimportant. All that mattered were the m and the n.
For my software friends:
In the early 1970ies, it was totally utopian to build such a thing as random generator software. After all, the device was supposed to create the bit patterns rather quickly, because they were supposed to test the maximum flat modules for large-capacity computers. And those were rather fast gadgets, considering the times.
Also, Herr Bieck could not have cared less how I solved the problem – that meant it was up to me if I programmed something for the calculation or if I found the big Mersenne prime numbers somewhere else in the world. All options were open.
Consequently, I spent the next few days in various libraries (Siemens, StaBi, Unis – you have to remember that, in those days, the internet did not exist). And I quickly realized that there was no chance for me finding Mersenne prime numbers in this way, even if someone on this planet had already calculated them.
This is why I forced myself to come to a quick decision. I was going to forget the world around me and try it by myself – by just programming. I still had more than five weeks to go.
This was the first thing I learned about “project management”: Decide quickly, especially if it is a really hard decision and you basically know no way out.
Then I tried to do some traditional programming. I thought in terms of the decimal system, looking into integer and arithmetic calculation systems. And after two weeks, I noticed that I was never ever going to succeed with this strategy.
And this was the second thing I learned for future projects and for life: Whenever you do not know how to continue, you have to try new ways! Kiss old concepts and patterns good-bye, and do not hesitate!
So I decided to no longer look for huge numbers. Instead, I just saw a number as a field of bits. And all of a sudden, all those big numbers became small numbers. For instance, 2-to-the-power-of-256 was now a binary field with the length of 32 bytes. And you can calculate rather elegantly with bit fields each of which has the length of 32 bytes. All you have to do is some shifting. And suddenly, the huge number had lost all its scariness …
I told you this story for two reasons.
Firstly, because all of a sudden it became clear to me that, on top of deciding quickly and courageously, you also have to leave old mental concepts if you want to achieve something special. And I often suffered under this and under the typical “But this is how we always did it …”, because it blocked the way.
And because I am living proof that, more than 40 years ago, Siemens actually worked in the same way as they sometimes say Google does today. And that in those days they achieved really great things and that there was not much competition world-wide, perhaps IBM and Xerox or Hitachi. All the others were just in their initial phases.
In a short time, you will read my next Berlin #PMCampBER story on vintage project management. It is from a time when I had a contract as an employee – at the Siemens laboratory. That was in the late 1970ies. I will relate how Siemens did everything, and I mean really everything, to destroy its greatness.
It happened because they kissed their old virtues good-bye and introduced division of labour (Taylorism) in the creative areas such as product planning (Requirement Management) and quality management, specialized DV/IT teachers in their D-schools, manual copy editors and many more such roles.
And, above all, whenever there were things to decide, the questions they asked were: “What is the profit of this?” and “What is our advantage?”, instead of the question: “Why do we do this?” – as in former times.
At the time of my first project, there were no such things as project managers. The first project manager you will find in the world as I perceived it will come with my third project management vintage story. That was in the early 1980ies.
RMD
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