A Letter From Our President, Bill 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.