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tangles, links, and webs

control room, to actually program a computer system. Kevin and I would soon join a team of people who would ultimately bring about the demise of that control room. Alas, the racks of glowing electronics would be slowly dismantled and replaced by a boring oval of computer consoles, run by much more powerful software.

The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground. Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads. We learned the most in conversations at coffee at tables strategically placed at the intersection of two corridors. I would be introduced to people plucked out of the flow of unknown faces, and I would have to remember who they were and which piece of equipment or software they had designed. The weblike structure of CERN made the job even harder. Of the ten thousand people in the CERN phone book, only five thousand or so were at CERN at any given time, and only three thousand or so were actually salaried staff. Many of the others had a desk, and visited from their home institutions only every now and again.

To house contractors who suddenly arrived in a panic to help advance some project or other, management had erected portable cabins on the top of a grassy hill on the grounds. Groups of us would discuss our ideas at lunch overlooking the Swiss vineyards, or as we walked down the long flight of concrete steps from the hill to the experiment hall and terminal room to do the programming. I filled in the odd moments when I wasn't officially working on the Proton Synchrotron Booster by tinkering with my play program, the one I called Enquire. Once I had a rough version, I began to use it to keep track of who had written which program, which program ran on which machine, who was part of which project. Informal discussions at CERN would invariably be accompanied by diagrams of circles and arrows scribbled on napkins and envelopes, because it was a natural way to show relationships between people and equipment. I wrote a four-page manual