Entering a program for the G-15 was a matter of typing it onto paper tape on a teletype, then feeding the tape into the computer. The main memory was not today’s semiconductor RAM, not even the precursor core (magnetic donuts) technology. It used a rotating drum to hold programs – so hot-shot programmers would place consecutive instructions at an interval apart on the drum so that when one instruction had been completed the next would be just about to come under the read head, all lined up to be read, interpreted, and executed as quickly as possible, rather than waiting an average of 1/2 a rotation of the drum for the next instruction to be available.

I wrote programs in FORTRAN for a small civil engineering company for many years. I maintained & extended both a basic accounting system set up by IBM and the COGO (COordinate GeOmetry) program used by the engineers. I did the legwork to move them from an IBM 1130 to a DEC PDP 11/40 computer running RSX-11D, an early multi-user operating system. The latter never reached its full potential because the computer didn’t have enough RAM (which was quite expensive at the time) to handle multiple users.

I was lured from civil engineering by a “jack of all trades” position at the local university’s (DE, USA) College of Education (from wiring circuits for experimental data gathering to managing a lightly used unix system to working on an Old English Concordance to using the PLATO system). I moved from there to the university’s central computer support organization to be the first person specifically supporting the newly-introduced IBM PC, followed by adding the Apple Macintosh, and later other PCs.

It stuns me to consider the speed of tech evolution, and how it keeps evolving, rapidly. All mentioned above was before ubiquitous computers and the Internet, which have opened up seemingly unending new realms for evolution – for personal interaction, for access to tools and information, and so much more.

I live in rural Vermont – moved here a dozen years ago and settled in. I earn a living largely through providing tech skills to local schools and businesses. I’m interested in yoga & related knowledge (ayurveda, nad & swar yoga, tantra, &c), Sufi & Buddhist traditions, and other spirit-traditions.

I initially created this site to hold conversations around Systematics, other systems-related topics, and some mathematical ideas that hold my interest.

Thanks to Tony Blake and a s/core of fellow-seekers, there have been ongoing, though perhaps intermittent, conversations (via deeper-d and earlier online groups) of great interest, generally on topics flowing from the work of John Bennett, particularly Systematics. See web sites www.duversity.org/ and www.toutley.demon.co.uk/ for more on Tony’s work. For more general information on Systematics, see www.systematics.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php.

I met Richard Knowles through the above interests. His book _The Leadership Dance: Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness_ uses the enneagram (9-termed system) in a unique way that I consider to hold great value.

I’ve read much of what Stafford Beer wrote on the “viable system”. The recursiveness of systems in his model intrigues me. That is, the low-level components of a system are themselves (in their own smaller scope) systems. I’ve not found many interested in discussing Beer’s ideas, but would like to.

Reminder to self: put together some words on Bennett and how his ideas have found traction in corporate USA. Sigurd Sr. worked in Organizational Development for DuPont for decades, and shared that experience – the ideas & how they were conveyed & used – with his first child.

I’m going to tag this note with “UniS” – name of a group precursor to deeper_d that I prefer for moniker.

The CMS is a way to manage content over time. It also provides a base onto which a cornucopia of individual functions can be layered – blogs, bulletin boards, shopping carts, and so on. The work is in getting to know how a particular set of tools works, get to know it in detail, find its stumbly-corners, its strengths. Figure out all the tweaks (settings), what function each provides. Because I’m interested in building web sites, that investment in time and mental energy pays off for the next web site, and the one after that.

I didn’t know that a wellspring of ideas wanting to bubble out would spring forth. So I now have two tasks in “producing” this event called a blog, or web site, or in general, “web presence.” One is getting to know the controls. The other is deciding what to put out there, adding content.

As I write this, I’m realizing that it can be a tool for me to structure whatever’s on my mind, [for instance, going back and putting this paragraph in first person] by putting it out there for anyone to read. What am I thinking about? On what topics would I be interested in engaging in a discussion with another? How do I introduce (mathematical and other) ideas to others that are new to them, how do I share my sense that such ideas may help an interested observer/participant figure out “what’s going on” in our physical, mental and psychic/feeling worlds?

So, less than a week into it, I’ll see where this unintended experiment takes me.

Various spiritual/self-development traditions have been part of my life. I believe our life is a gift, and our implicit task in this life is to find a way to use our being and the circumstance containing us to “good ends.” That includes exploring the measure of “good.”

I’ve found help in “working on self” in a variety of traditions beyond the Christian tradition in which I was raised. These include Hindu (chakras as a model for levels of human consciousness, various branches of yoga, ayurveda, and more), Sufi, and Buddhist traditions, and the “Bennett branch” of what Gurdjieff brought forth.