I Love Tech, But...

Bob Wilson returns to I Love Tech, But... to tell us about the transition from traditional telecommunications work to the data communications responsibilities that helped shape modern IT.

In this episode, Barbara and her dad talk about

The transition of telecom specialists to the IT staff of today

PBXs, leased telephone lines, modems, and early data communications

Why growing use of data created a new skills problem for employers

How Northeastern University’s Continuing Education programs responded to workplace needs

Why working engineers and practitioners were valuable instructors for these courses

RS-232 connections, straight-through cables, and crossover cables

The memorable “gender mender” story that taught some new technicians about mixed cable types

Early remote classroom technology at Northeastern

Teletype machines and military message switching

The technical meanings of synchronous and asynchronous communication

An unexpected connection back to the earlier Replace Core episode

This conversation continues I Love Tech, But…’s exploration of how today’s technology grew out of earlier systems, practices, and very human attempts to make new tools actually work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com

A hospital laboratory computer crashes in the middle of the workday. The staff spend hours completing their work manually. The system comes back up, but nobody knows what caused the failure.

In this episode, my dad, Bob Wilson, takes us back to the 1970s and his work supporting the laboratory computer system at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston.

A communication problem between the laboratory system and the hospital’s administrative computer was causing patient-data messages to be rejected, queued, and retransmitted in a digital doom spiral that consumed all available disk space and brought down the system.

Starting with an inch-thick printout of the computer’s core memory that arrived by mail, Bob traces the problem to an unusual interaction between the communications hardware and a longitudinal parity check.

Then the hospital calls: it’s happening again.

The queue is growing. They have about 45 minutes before another crash.

There isn’t time to produce and distribute a conventional software fix. Instead, Bob creates a three-instruction patch, converts it to octal, and dictates it over the phone to the hospital’s console operator.

The final command?

Replace core.

In other words: update the computer system while it’s running. What could possibly go wrong?

In this episode, we talk about:

* debugging from a printed dump of core memory

* computer-to-computer communication in an early hospital information system

* the tiny edge case that caused the failure

* why the same bad message kept returning

* patching machine instructions directly into a live system

* what happened when Bob’s boss found out

* the permanent fix that followed

* why modern hardware and software safeguards make this kind of intervention largely impossible today

* how healthcare computing evolved from something resembling the Wild West into an environment built around testing, redundancy, permissions, and controlled deployment

Technology has changed enormously since the ’70s. Thankfully, so has our troubleshooting.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com

In the late 1980s, Debbie Wilson had to pass a computer-literacy test to complete her college degree, even though she had never actually used a personal computer. She tells Barbara how Bluff Your Way in Computers, a memorized glossary, and one alarming instruction to “type BASIC” helped her navigate an early and very different era of personal computing.

It is a funny family story about adult education, changing technology, and how quickly the definition of computer literacy can change.

Subscribe to I Love Tech, But… in your podcast app and on Substack for more conversations about technology in human context.

Consider sharing this episode with someone who never knew that turning on a computer used to count as a technical skill.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com

Today, software updates download at high speed from the cloud. In the 1970s, Bob Wilson carried enterprise hospital computer systems into the air as five-megabyte 12-inch-round carry-ons.

In this episode, Barbara talks with her dad, one of the original wizards of IT, about delivering and upgrading hospital laboratory software before downloads, cloud storage, remote access, or modern software-development processes existed.

Bob explains how early hospital systems managed laboratory orders and results, how computers were booted using machine code entered by hand, and how he repaired software on-site after the hospital shut its computer down for the night. With no code-review team or automated testing system behind him, he often rebuilt the software overnight and left the hospital running his revised code the next morning.

This is a story of enormous disk drives, paper tape, analog instruments, late-night debugging, and the people whose knowledge held early computer systems together.

Subscribe to I Love Tech, But… and share the episode with someone who would appreciate a trip back to the wild early days of hospital computing.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com

If you enjoy this episode, pop by my I Love Tech, But... Substack. It's free to subscribe!

Every time a new technology comes along, it’s either the best thing ever or it spells doom. And so it goes with AI scribes. Last week, a New York Times opinion piece took a pretty dim view of them. I love my AI scribe and hope I never have to go back to being chained to my computer screen during patient visits.

I’m not saying I completely trust my scribe, and I probably never will. That’s a good thing though. Clinicians still need to be responsible for every word that goes into the medical record. But if AI gives me a better first draft while I provide the judgment, context, and review, I’m there for it. A robot can organize my notes. It just doesn’t get to sign them.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com

All I need is a way to read email without having to constantly change cognitive set. Is that too much to ask in an AI world? So far, the answer is yes. These are my adventures so far.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ilovetechbutpub.substack.com