Interview with My Grandfather-Everett Dehn

Everett Dehn, now 68 and retired, enjoys playing tennis and staying healthy with his girl friend Shelly. He lives in Santa Clarita, California, but was born in the state of Minnesota in 1949. As a student, he always received excellent grades and graduated from the University of Minnesota, earning an electrical engineering degree in 1963. He always had interest in computers. As a specification clerk at Sperry Univac, he signed up for a position for a field engineer and received his job. After thirty ears of devotion to NASA Tracking stations and working at Sperry Univac, he retired at the age of 55 and shares the changes of computer technologies.

I used to install and maintain computers at NASA air force and tracking Stations and the computers we had where great huge things and they had very limited memory and capacity compared to just the small laptops and computer that exists now a days. I have an electrical engineering degree and went five years in University in Minnesota. I got a job with a telephone company and management training. Although we were not compatible, I always had interest in computers. I had to work for Univac as a specifications clerk so I went back to Unisys which was Sperry Univac at that time and saw if anything was open. Luckily, they had a position for a field engineer so I said ok, I got my electrical engineering degree and the background so I signed up for what was available, and they trained me. In the beginning, they taught me how to fix the equipment. Although I already new a little bit of all programming , they taught me physically to run tests, how to install them, look them up and then if something was wrong, how to troubleshoot.

The first computer that I worked on was at college, University of Minnesota witch was in a whole room, and it had to be air conditioned and you name it. It was very huge computer. In 1964, I worked at original pay at Caicos Islands at a NASA tracking station in Grand Turk islands, 500 miles near the Bahamas, in the Caribbean. Working for Sperry Univac at the time was very very interesting and working for NASA on the space program was extremely interesting. They had to have a lot of remote stations because they didn’t have satellites and with out satellites, you had to place the stations in a place where they could communicate with the space craft, the first one was Project Mercury and then we worked on project Gemini. Towards the end, I was working on the Apollo program. The Apollo program was where they were getting prepared to land on the moon and we eventually landed on the moon. The others were preparations prior to actually getting to the moon. We primarily used what was called the twelve eighteen- twelve nineteen computer which was a computer that was as tall as myself and three to four feet wide. It did not near have the capacity as today’s computers.

The stations we had were fairly large facilities in witch you have computers, tape recorders, transmitters, and receivers. They were fairly substantial. About twenty to thirty people were there and when they had actual flight, they had five to six people come down from NASA to support the missions. When you had a mission launch, you have a mission control, go down there and you would have six, seven or eight people there around the stations communicating and talking with the astronauts, be able to troubleshoot, and tell them what things were happening there because you had to have more of a direct line to communicate. And now a day you don’t need that direct line anymore. I installed the stations originally and with installing, we had five or six weeks but I actually worked in Mexico at Guanajuato for eighteen months. The first one was in Grand Turk islands and I was there for three months. In Greenland, I was there for six weeks and seven weeks, and in Kodiak Alaska, 6 week s to seven weeks. Most of the people I dealt with spoke English; I speak a little bit of Spanish and when I was in Mexico I used it but I didn’t use it on my job I used it just for my social interactions. I met quite a few Mexican people and they were very nice and helpful. When I screwed up they didn’t seem to mind to help. It was not hard except you had to pick up and go but that wasn’t a real hard experience but it was a learning experience.

The first computer I bought was Sperry computer witch they actually imported from Japan. It had very little power and it cost me twenty -three hundred dollars because I worked for them and it couldn’t do a lot and it wasn’t hooked up on to the internet at that time, and very slow, very little amount of memory. Twenty three hundred dollars were a lot of money back then it cost more a lot back then for a lot less capability than you have now a days by far no comparison. There weren’t as many people that had it when I first got mine. More and more people are getting them now. Almost every house -well not every house, but majority of household have computers and in the schools. Computers are everywhere. That wasn’t the case when I was doing it. There were key boards and there was a computer and a monitor and a printer. They had a printer too but I used it primarily for a creating reports. Right, now I use it for playing, e-mail to keep in touch with people and relations, playing bridge, looking at the news and stock market and keeping my financial records and my fidelity brokerage firm, so it takes up some of my time.

I got the Dell computer and I got the Earthlink uh that’s when I had the first internet but I can’t recall it was six or seven years ago. I use is now than I did back then. I actually have a faster interface right now; DSL interface, high speed DSL pro version and its so much quicker and faster now to use it than when I originally bought it which was a little show. It’s much more convenient than whatever it was doing previously. It’s really an aide or tool. It makes communication easier. When we didn’t have computers as a kid, we were always going to play ground playing horseshoes, playing basketball, baseball, ah that type of thing. Just mainly sports tag, just riding around just a lot more physical activities then a good percent of people nowadays don’t do.

After working for Sperry Univac for thirty years, the company was merged with burrows and well any way the company went down hill after the merger and they were starting to uh, lay off people and um so people thought that they might go bankrupt so I got laid off and I was fifty- five and I could've maybe excepted the job somewhere else but I made enough money working with the company on temporary assignments so it wasn't necessary for me to work so I said heck with it I’m going to retire!

Interviewed By: Seina Okamoto