November Twenty Eight

Genesis ... Part Three

While I was still at Calvin College, I have not yet became a US citizen, and my Indonesian passport needed renewal for me to maintain my legal status. I communicated with the Indonesian consulate in the US, and received a passport renewal request form, as well as a name change form with an explanation. If you have been around a long time, you might remember that in 1965 (just before I left Indonesia) there was a big revolt going on there. The founder and lifetime, one and only president at the time, President Sukarno was overthrown by the military, led by General Suharto. Sukarno, with the support of communist Chinese government was attempting to wrestle absolute power from the military, and it back fired on him. He was then put in house arrest until he died several years later.

The fact that the China supported this attempted coup d'etat, and that in general, most Indonesian of Chinese ethnicity are economically better off than the natives caused a lot of jealousy. Many big riots, house burning, killing, and discrimination occurred between 1965 and the years since. At that time, Indonesian of Chinese ethnicity still used their Chinese names, including me. If you are my family, you know what my initial T.H.L. stand for. Anyway, the name change was "suggested" to minimize the race discrimination problem that I might encounter. Someone told me what my Chinese name meant, so in the process of renewing my Indonesian passport, I went ahead and changed my legal name to a commonly used Indonesian name. The Indonesian word "rahman" means "grace" in English. Nowadays, many Indonesian Chinese have picked common Indonesian name, thus on paper, even I cannot distinguish whether they are native Indonesian or Indonesian of Chinese ancestry. I'll leave it to you to guess how my first name Julius came about? Because this name change was encouraged by the Indonesian authority, some of my siblinsg and relatives also changed theirs. Unfortunately, we all picked different last names, thus my brother Budi ended up with Kabcdefghij.

Since my college graduation, I have worked for 5 different companies, everyone of them involved mostly with government related contracts. Towards my last year at the first company, I started doing computer design, and embarked on a design for my home personal computer. At that time, you cannot buy a PC or Mac as you can do now. The only computer systems that exists are home brewed by electronic hobbyist, and most of them used the just created computer microprocessor chip called the 4004, followed by 4040 (4-bit computer chips) then the 8008, 8080, and Z80 (8-bit chips). My design was based on the Z80, and I built by own chassis (aluminum box), with power supply, and toggle switches for inputting data and memory address. It has a grand total of 8 kilobytes of memory, and no hard drive. Every memory instructions have to be entered one memory address, and one memory value at a time. Do a wikipedia on "microprocessor" to get more detailed information. Isn't it amazing how much computer technology has progressed since then? For me, as an engineer I have been able to see and appreciate the leap frog improvements and enabling technologies that were involved in their development to date. It is an experience that most people have benefitted but not realized how amazing it is to see what we've been able to accomplish now with these tiny silicon pieces.

Steph and Jen were born in Michigan, and later we moved to Indiana for my second company. Mel and Brian were born there. We moved there in late summer, and I remember Kathy who was then pregnant with Mel walking around the Three Rivers Festival hoping that Mel would come early, as she was very uncomfortable. But Mel was carried to full term like the others. I also remember the first heavy snow we had there. At that time we were still living in an apartment while our house was being built. It snowed and snowed, and by the time it stopped, the snow accumulation was about half way up the windows.

While in Indiana, I was involved in the computer system development that process data from the first ever CAT scan system (computerized axial tomography) being manufactured by Phillips Medical System. At that time, Philips and G.E. were racing to be the first manufacturers of this new medical imaging system. At that time the data from a CAT scan was recorded on a spool of magnetic tape the size of a big serving platter. We then process the data on a DEC PDP-11/34 machine, and it would take several hours to produce the slice images.

To be continued.