Biography of Donald Daniel

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I am a retired electronic engineer. I was born in 1941. I wish information on waltz balls and social ballroom dancing had been readily available in my younger days, and am making it as readily available as I can as a public service for no compensation in my retirement. These balls are an opportunity for people with similar tastes to meet, and an oasis to experience an environment they prefer. Before age 77 I attended country-western dances regularly and balls when I could.

You have permission to link from your site to any part of my site.

Waltzballs.org is a one man organization. Here at waltzballs.org I am the chairman of the board, president, chief financial officer, head of the research department, and janitor. There is good communication between the departments. The only member of the staff who does not always do good work is the janitor.

By giving away free of charge information that I hope is valuable, I try to serve as an impoverished philanthropist.

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I got a BS in physics, an MS in physics, and flunked out of a PhD in physics. The job market was down. I could not get a job in physics. The shortage of electronic engineers got me a job on probation as an electronic engineer if I could learn it fast enough on the job. I did. So I can claim to be a college flunkout, a fallen physicist, and a counterfeit engineer!

My career of researching engineering subjects and writing engineering reports to reveal what I found out has resulted in a compulsion to write about various useful things that I have learned about. This web site is the result.

An author has imaginary conversations with imaginary people who might one day read the stuff he is trying to write. Thus he has a lively social life, but it is an imaginary one.

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I started programming computers in 1963. I created my program on a keypunch machine that had a keyboard and punched holes in 7.375 by 3.25 inch paper cards. Each card represented one line of text. The keypunch machine was separate from the computer. The computer was an IBM 1620 model 1 computer. The picture below shows the 1620 model 2. The cabinet with the plastic window behind the right side of the computer is a hard drive. Both the model 1 and the model 2 had a typewriter on the desk that was part of the computer, but could only be used by the IBM repairman. Computer users could only use a card reader and card punch not shown in the picture. When I started on the model 1 it did not have a hard drive. No screen, keyboard, hard drive or operating system. Only a CPU, memory and card machine. The user put in a deck of cards containing his program and a deck of cards containing the first half of the Fortran compiler. After some time of blinking lights the computer punched out a deck of cards that was your program half compiled. You put your half compiled deck in with a deck that was the second half of the compiler. The computer punched out a deck of cards with either errors or results. It was the stone age of computing. The machine in the extreme upper right hand corner was an IBM 407 accounting machine that weighed 2620 pounds or 1.3 tons and that could read cards and print the information on fanfold paper. My first program computed a table of numbers representing the frequency response of a twoport circuit model written in fortran-2.

I bought an Apple-2 computer in 1978, serial number 5000 something. It had 48k memory and two 140k floppy drives. I bought UCSD pascal for it 1979, which came with a 16k memory card which brought the total up to 64k of memory. In 1982 I wrote a printed circuit autorouter program on the apple-2 that had about 1600 lines of code. I had to swap floppys in and out to compile it. There was not enough room in memory so all arrays resided on floppy disk during program execution. Lots of reading and writing to floppy. To compute the routing for a board with 33 dual inline packages of TTL chips required about five hours of computing time. After that, a separate program read the arrays and plotted the artwork on an HP 7225 plotter. It is inconceivable to today's programmers to do so much with so little.

I was a physics student in graduate school in the 1960's. Edward Teller came to visit. After his formal presentation with students and faculty present, he wanted an informal gathering with only the graduate students. I do not remember his exact words, but I remember clearly the gist of what he advised. We were not in a first class university, so we would waste our time trying to make a contribution worthy of a Nobel prize. There are plenty of grubby unglamorous contributions that we CAN make. I like to think that he would approve of the articles in my website.

I must say that I am almost astonished by my own antiquity. My father's mother was born in 1871. When my father was young he was in the horse cavalry and learned to charge on horseback with a saber against straw practice dummies. I remember when LP phonograph records came out in 1951. In 1952 we lived on a farm, and in school just for fun I used a male muscovy duck's wing feather to write with ink instead of a fountain pen. I remember when ballpoint pens came out in 1953. I learned to use a slide rule in high school. In college I taught myself to program on a large, very primitive computer that cost as much as ten houses in the neighborhood where I live. I taught myself mechanical drafting with a Keuffel and Esser brand Paragon drafting set that came out in 1867. The exact same set was still sold when I bought it brand new, a brand new antique.

Given my advanced age, any day this web page might not have an author. I hope that in the event of my death, others will have saved the zip file of this web site so that they can put this web page on the internet under the version of the GNU public license that does not permit alterations. The site could remain in English or be translated to other languages. The references that are only temporarily available, such as links, email addresses and phone numbers to others should be deleted. My stuff could be part of larger web sites that have other articles by other people living or dead.

Addendum 6-6-2017. Recently my website was hosted by Yahoo. But Verizon bought yahoo. On 5-21-17 Yahoo sent me an email warning that new terms of service would come into effect on 6-8-17. The new terms of service would effectively give them ownership of my content, and possibly the right to prevent anyone else from reproducing my content after my death. So I moved my site to a different hosting service and called Yahoo to cancel my contract with them. On 6-2-17 they verbally said the contract is cancelled but refused to confirm cancellation in writing or by email. So after my death they might dispute the date of cancellation and claim rights they are not due. This is for the information of anyone else that might wish to reproduce my content after my death.

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