Della

As a new assistant professor I had a startup package promised to me by the Stanford ChemE department. Among the things promised were funding for two PhD students for two years as was the going expectation for new professors. They cleverly said the funding was from sources internal to Stanford so, when I won a starter grant from the center for materials research, that counted as startup funding!!

I was also promised a workstation to support my computational, theoretical work. There were good deals promoted by Sun Microsystems so the department, with help from the School of Engineering, bought a Sun 3/280 Workstation. It was the newest, fastest and best workstation just out that year. It was delivered in a big box to Bud Homsy’s research group’s office. I hadn’t foreseen that this was to become the departmental server. This was 1986 and email was a relatively new thing. More on this later.

George M. “Bud” Homsy was a great mentor, friend and later the chair of the department. He and a friend Doug Lane held DWD hikes on weekends - DWD stood for drinking, walking and drinking. We started with tea and coffee and were able to drive to trailheads. Growing up in Fresno, in the Central Valley of California, Bud shared his memories of hot summers, lots of chores and his dislike of lentils which were required eating in his Catholic family (he would never eat another lentil).

Bud pursued research on flow through porous media, fluidised beds and other interesting and complex fluid mechanical projects. Like me, he combined experiment and theory and their theoretical work required a lot of mathematics. Bud’s group of grad students were a clever bunch. Brad Carpenter, Anne and a Chinese student whose name was confusing and told us to call him « chainsaw ».

Our big box arrived. It was about the size of a small dormitory refrigerator. We carefully unpacked it and admired it’s putty coloured casing. There was a small instruction booklet. We opened it. The instructions described, in great detail, in multiple languages, how to plug the power cord into a wall socket. This is somewhat like airplane safety instructions on how to buckle your seatbelt. We all knew how to plug the thing in. We didn’t know what to do next.

No other piece of paper existed, no other instructions were included. It said somewhere to ask your system administrator. We realised we were the only humans dealing with this so we must be the system administrators. This is way before the World Wide Web allowed people to look up answers to questions.

We looked at each other and wondered how to login to the thing. The now plugged in workstation sat there with small lights indicating that it was powered on. We had no idea what to do next.

As my husband worked at HP with unix based servers and workstations, we called him. He asked whether we had tried typing « root ». No we hadn’t.

So we typed root, it asked for a password. We called my Brad back and he suggested “farkel”, a password often set by unix system designers. We said, really? Like the Farkel family on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh in? Yep, farkel it was, now we had a workstation we could work with.

We had to name our workstation and since the other member of the Homsy research group present was Brad Carpenter’s golden retriever, we named the workstation “Della” after her. She wagged her tail whenever we mentioned her name. Thus we set up users and alice@della.chemeng.stanford.edu was my first email address.

In those early days of email, our department had a green screen in the Chairman’s office with a typewriter next to it. Our department administrator, Margie, would read the Chair’s emails and type up the ones that he needed to deal with! Before long, the whole department was equipped with @della.chemeng.stanford.edu addresses. I never knew how much this impacted Della’s performance for our computations.

My students working on the most computationally intensive projects were quite resourceful finding the best computer workstation clusters available in the university. There were also some mainframe computers where you could run “jobs”. If they were really intensive you were supposed to run them in “nice” mode. In many of the workstation clusters you could use more than one CPU at a time. If it was a quiet night, you might run programs on all the computers in the cluster. One evening in an Engineering School cluster, my student David saw another user crawling around on the floor putting his ear to each workstation. After listening to each computer he switched the power off and on again. David asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was listening to see if the computer was running and, if not, he power-cycled it so he could use it afresh. My student rolled his eyes and went home as some of his programs had been interrupted.

As I departed from Stanford to move to MIT in 2001, my email address was still alice@della.chemeng.stanford.edu. I’m sure that, by then, we had migrated to another system but our department subdomain kept Della’s name and our early efforts alive in our minds.