John Flynn
Short Bio
After I left Wang in 1982 I moved to Nashville, Tennessee and got into the kidney dialysis business. Except for a short stint as a PC consultant in the late 80's I've been programming in the area of health care ever since. In 1990 I cofounded MIQS, Inc. and as the chief programmer I developed our main product, an electronic patient record system for dialysis and other chronic diseases. In 1997 I (and the company) moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I live with my wife of 17 years, Angie, and our two daughters.Stories and Anecdotes
I came to Wang straight out of college in the summer of 1980. It was a choice between Wang, or to work on the MX Missile system. I was hired by Jonathan Addleston into the OIS operating system group. Later the group was taken over by Jim McCarthy. I started out on the 9th floor of the first tower. By the time I left Wang in 1982 we had already moved into the second tower.Here's a stream of consciousness:
I remember several of the people in my group: Eugene Wang, Lori Blanchette, Steve Koch, Jim McCarthy, Pat Galvin. There are so many others I can picture clearly but the names have slipped away.
I never met John Golini but his name, or rather his initials JG, were on everything and I could sense his ghost standing over me making sure I didn't screw up his code.
Remember the T shirts that read "My Wang Never Goes Down"? Remember the 8 inch floppy disks? How about Harold's birthday party (or was it the 928 anniversary party) in one of the meeting rooms downstairs, complete with belly dancers?
At one point a few of us became obsessed with video games. Several times a week for lunch Jim, Eugene, and I would drive out to a video arcade in downtown Lowell and pump quarters into the machines. Often Jonathan Addleston would come with us. I'm sure it was amusing to see us in our torn jeans and Jonathan in his suit and tie, sweatily battling aliens.
As the second tower was going up we monitored the progress by looking out the windows near the elevators. We admired the lone female construction worker on the crew.
One of the major projects I worked on was the "Extended Memory Master," which was a nifty idea to double the total memory capacity in the master from 64K to 128K (yes that is a K), by separating the program address space from the data address space. Accesses to "data" were sent by the hardware to one 64K bank, while accesses to "program" were sent to the other 64K bank. My task was to locate and rewrite all instances of self-modifying code in the operating system.
Another project I remember was the WISE box (Wang Inter-System Exchange), which was a doodad that let you hook up to four OIS masters together. I don't think we knew the word "network" back then, but that's what it was. You could chain these things together to form arbitrarily large networks. We had a raging debate about whether the software should allow redundant paths between any two masters in the WISE network (i.e. loops). Oh, the final decision was no, don't allow loops.
My short time at Wang was extremely rewarding. The OIS product was in its heyday, and the air was always full of excitement. The people I worked with were great, and the technical programming work fascinated me. I hated to leave, but silly me, I had to follow my girlfriend (now ex-wife) to medical school in Nashville.