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WILLIAM DITTUS
Bill Dittus is the past President for East Tennessee
Computer Society (ETCS) and is continuing to serve as leader of the Hardware
SIG.
Bill was born in Kankakee, Illinois it’s only claim to
fame was an obscure song by Arlo Guthrie, “The City of New Orleans”.
Growing up he was very interested in anything “electronic”.
When Uncle Sam called with a lottery number of 25 he quickly joined
the Navy where he was trained as an electrician and served aboard the
Submarine Tender, “Howard W.
Gilmore”.
He attended IVY Technical College where he received an
Associates Degree in Digital Electronics.
After his service Bill went on to become a maintenance
electrician at several manufacturing plants.
He also worked at Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where
he helped to build several Sprunace class destroyers and the Tarawa class
LHA aircraft carriers. After
this he went on to work for Amtrak and helped keep the high speed French
turbo trains running between Chicago and Detroit.
He then shifted gears and became a instrument service
engineer for Gary Tube Works. One of his duties was to perform maintenance
programming on a IBM PC model XT with a huge 10 meg hard drive, and 1024 k
of memory which was used to control 3 networked heat treating furnaces
running a custom IBM BASIC-A program.
(There were very few commercial software packages available for the
IBM PC at this time, and none for process control)
After the plant closed it’s doors, Bill then went to
work for Taylor Instrument Company and specialized in PC Based Process
Control traveling all over the south east.
Bill’s time was spent starting up and maintaining both PC based and
large DCS (Distributed Control Systems) systems.
As part of the startup of such systems he taught many
classes in understanding and using the computers supplied by Taylor.
He started up a major new Boiler for a fertilizer plant in Ashaganj,
Bangledesh.
Bill then moved over to Bailey Controls where he specialized in
Operator Interface Consoles and their operation and configuration as well as
Power and Grounding sensitive electronic equipment.
He was sent overseas to review and confirm grounding at power
stations in Indonesia. As well as console configuration at a ADNOC gas plant
in United Arab Emirates.
Throughout his career, Bill has worked in and on most
small to medium sized computer systems.
He has worked and taught classes in DOS, Windows, VMS, and an obscure
variant of UNIX called QNX.
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Louis Puster was born and educated in Knoxville TN. Graduated from
the University of Tennessee with a BSEE. He began working as a student
programmer at UT's Computing Center shortly after the department was
created. He enjoyed watching and helping the IBM technicians when they
came to install or repair the equipment. He designed and built an
interface between the IBM 7040 computer and a bell. The bell would
ring when the computer called for operation intervention, such as to mount a
tape. The night operators loved it. They would bring their
sleeping bag and take naps between tape mounts.
Shortly before graduation, he was invited to apply for employment at IBM.
IBM assigned him to the computing facility at X-10 in Oak Ridge where he
worked on the IBM Model 75 and also keypunches, etc. on the site.
Drafted into the Army, he was assigned to Army Map Service in Washington, DC
where he found more computers to play with (both software development and
hardware modifications), and train others as well. While there, he
wrote an assembler from scratch for a modified Scientific Data Systems 910
and developed a floating-point package as well. When he separated from
active duty, the computer was doing orbital predictions for satellites on
the SECOR mapping project.
After the Army, Louis transferred to the IBM plant in Kingston NY, where his
first assignment was helping with the design of the FAA En route Air Traffic
Control System CPU (IBM 9020). This system is being phased out now,
but there may be some installations still in operation. He also worked
on many other projects during his IBM career.
When he was laid off after 22˝ years of service because of slumping
mainframe sales, he started a computer consulting firm, Computer Workshop.
After three years, he decided he had enough of the long, cold, winters in NY
and moved back to Tennessee and went to work for The University of Tennessee
as a computer programmer and LAN manager. After several years of
enjoyable work there he retired. He brought Computer Workshop with him
from NY and kept it active while working for UT, taking Annual Leave to
service his clients. Now that Computer Workshop has become
incorporated, he serves as President and continues to service the varied
needs of several clients in the Knoxville area.
Louis is a past Treasurer of the Hudson Valley Flying Club in New York (at
that time we owned 4 aircraft and had 60 members), and is currently serving
as the Treasurer of the East Tennessee Computer Society. Louis is
active in his Church where his current assignment is Financial Clerk.
However, the Treasurer of Computer Workshop is his wife, Barbara. He
has been an Amateur Radio operator since 1955 and a current member of the
Radio Amateur Club of Knoxville. Last summer he spent four days at BSA
Camp Buck Toms helping about eight scouts build small short wave receivers
from kits as part of their requirement to earn the Radio Merit Badge.
One of the scouts became so interested in Amateur Radio that he studied the
book all night and passed the exam the next day.
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Web
Master
Ed is retired from the Simplex Time Recorder company and has
worked on this web site since it's inception.
Ed competes in the south east in model airplane radio
control pattern. He is an extra class amateur radio operator.
His first computer was an Altair 8080. It was a kit and used
a teletype machine for it's interface.
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