Interview With Grigor Gekchyan                            

I waited at home by a window facing my backyard for my grandpa to come over so we can have an interview. He sat down at the opposite side of the table and put his cane to the side. I thought it would be easier to audiotape so I used a tape recorder. Grigor Gekchyan, age 73, should be able to tell me about some great changes in the 20^th century. His knowledge from being a student, professor, and tutor, should help him talk about how technology changed with education. With the traveling he has done over his life, he will know more about technology from different times and places in the world. He knows a lot about technology because he has worked on the earliest computers and witnessed the changes with technological advances. He is someone who enjoys watching television which I believe makes him more aware of changes. Technology is the main cause of most changes. I explained once more what we would be talking about to refresh his memory and he turned off the television so we could begin.

I was lucky as a kid because my school was only a few blocks away, so we walked to school. My friends and I walked to school. Kids who lived farther were often late to school. We didn’t really visit friends and relatives much because they lived too far and my parents came home from work, tired and broken and never had time to go somewhere. They needed time to rest after a long a day of work. Later we moved to Beirut and by then there were more forms of transportation. There were trolleys and trams, which were popular. Most people used trolleys and trams to go to work. There weren’t many car owners. Gasoline at the time was very expensive and few people could afford to drive cars and then refill the gas. People went to work by walking, driving, or riding a bicycle. The trains back then ran on steam. When we went somewhere far, we went with these steam locomotives, which were very slow. For example, to go to Moscow, it took three to four days. When airplanes started working, like trains, they used to be slow. I remember going to Moscow and it took 14 to 15 hours because we had to stop a lot of times because it ran out of fuel. Now it only takes about three hours. The advantage of trains was that you had more mobility and you could enjoy the scenery. It also felt safer closer to the ground. Airplanes were much faster.

Overall I liked to travel in planes because they were the fastest way to travel. Many people were afraid to fly. But in the beginning planes weren’t very, (cough) common. (Puts out his cigarette) That’s why I went with trains a few times in the beginning, but after that I always went with an airplane. I usually went to Moscow or other cities in Russia, for business reasons. The first time I flew was, I think in 1952 or 1955. The plane had a single engine, it was a lot slower than today’s airplanes, it shook a lot, and it was scary, the first time.

In 1949- uh, no, 1954 when I graduated from university, I got a job in Moscow where I had to work on a computer. This huge computer took up two rooms and had less than a hundred kilobytes of memory. It was called an academic knowledge-counting machine (at least that’s how I translated it). These machines I worked on were very slow and heated up quickly. They were very primitive. It took long to get a program to work. We tried over and over until it worked like it was supposed to. When there was something very complicated that needed to be done, the result depended on the programmer. Why? Because the programming languages were very poor. It took many people to make the programs finally work. The first computer I saw was only a thousand bytes per second, and the one we took to Armenia was 100. Computers and operating systems were the same. And the first computer we got was this EC 1020, which had only 356 kilobytes of memory, and today’s phones have more memory than those huge computers. Uh, for these computers, uh, to input data, uh, used, we called it perfo cards or punch cards. We punched uh, little holes in these cards and then input into computers or programs or data, these computers were reading through these cards very fast. And it was very funny, if accidentally we dropped these cards, it was very hard to resort these cards. Little by little, we got more powerful computers like one-megabyte computers. Slowly, computers had better quality.

The first personal computer I saw when I was working at an institute. This PC didn’t even have a hard drive and it used tape, similar to audiotapes. Thirty years ago nobody could believe that there will come a time when almost every family can have a personal computer at home. When I came to America, I went to a special school to learn the different programming languages of computers to become more familiar with them.

Uh, the first TV I saw was in1955 in Moscow. My neighbor bought a TV. It was black and white, of course, and it had such a small screen that it had a magnifier. And uh, we got a TV in 1960 or 61. We had only three or four channels: three local channels and 1 or 2 from Moscow. It was only black and white. If I’m not mistaken, there were no color televisions until around 1965. The first ones I saw did not have very good quality, and the screens were very small. The pictures weren’t very clean and smooth and there were barely sizes up 26 inches or 27 inches. The only bigger screen TVs I saw were in America. But still, color TV was an exciting invention for most people because the programs they liked were in color. Now I watch television especially for making my English better.

Interviewed by: David Kazaryan