Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
Computers
Q ..
Okay, that's fair. You were in from
to 1985. You went in there about the
that
computers were coming into engineering work in good quantities. How much did those
computers change your work in H&H at OCE and throughout the Corps in those years?
Well, to tell you the truth, it didn't really change the work much in OCE. Where it did
A
change the work was out in the production area out in the districts where they were doing
a lot of studies. Then HEC was probably the most prominent organization in the Corps
for developing computer capability when it first came along. They had converted
hydrology and hydraulics computations to computer use quite a bit before some of the
other disciplines got their stuff converted over. Now they didn't do so
new
development in hydrology and hydraulics. I mean, like new theories or things like that,
but they took all the existing capabilities and converted it over to computer use.
We used to have a lot of discussions about how they should develop that--the use of the
computer. Some of the district offices were almost as prolific as HEC was in coming out
with computer programs. Take, for example, Rock Island District, a fellow named Nanda
from the Rock Island District--I can't even remember his first name. Maybe that's his first
name. He is an Indian. He was really competent in hydrology and in computer
programming. He liked developing small computer programs that he could hook together.
HEC got more and more into big programs that worked so you could do a batch load.
Well, back in those days, in the early days, they did everything in batch load. You
to load this thing up on a big computer and then wait in line to get your stuff. Nowadays,
they have PCs [personal computers], of course, and you don't have to worry about waiting
in line, you can just go ahead and do your studies.
But you would write up your program and your input data and put it on cards and give
them to whoever was running the big computer. So you really didn't get to run the
computer yourself, you just gave them the cards and they ran the computer. Except in
places like HEC, where they got access to some of the big computers, and they rented
space on some of the Lawrence Laboratory [computers], I think, and some of the other big
places where they got the use of some really sophisticated computers.
I used to argue with HEC about putting together large package programs where you
would provide all the input data in one run. The data would go in one end and out the
other end would come all this information and results on what you needed to know about
the project in order to design it without anything in between. You didn't get any outputs
in between.
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