Published: October 13, 2008 12:00 am            

Mike McLaury: Technical pioneer

50 years ago, he was part of OU's first computer class

Editor's Note: This is the first in a weeklong series profiling University of Oklahoma graduates and looking at what they're doing with their lives since their college days.

It was 1958, just before the spring semester was to begin, and the University of Oklahoma had just acquired its first computer. A 40-hour class in programming had been announced.

Mike McLaury was a junior math student working part-time for professor Richard Andree who encouraged him to enroll in the one-week class.

From that single short course, historic in that it was the first computer class to be taught at OU, an interest was born which grew into a career for McLaury.

The computer had been installed in Buchanan Hall, known as "the math building," and McLaury recalled it had a capacity of about 2,000 words, "around 16K" in memory. The computer itself "was about my height," he recalled, and about two feet wide, and three to four feet deep.

Other equipment included a card reader, a key punch, a card puncher and a printer. All was housed in a room that was kept extremely cold because of the heat from the computer. The computer "was loaded with vacuum tubes," he said, recalling the oddity of studying in a cold room.

"There was not a lot of air conditioning around in those days," he said. And the chill was really on when they entered the room in the morning after the computer had been off all night.

Instructors were Will Viavant, an engineering professor sometimes called "Wild Bill." The students learned machine language, a set of codes on making changes on the rotating drum of memory.

"It was slow, very cumbersome," McLaury recalled, "but we were eventually able to program it."

Without an inkling of how computers would evolve in the next few decades, they wrestled with the complicated process while professors were dreaming of how the computer, even with what seems today to be such a limited capacity, could help them in their research.

"But who could visualize what we have today?" he said. "I remember that some guy involved in design said that we wouldn't need more than four or five computers in the nation. But of course he was thinking of big computers."

McLaury only recalls one of the other students in that original programming class -- Norman resident E. Z. Million, who also went on to build a career in the computer industry.

"E. Z. and I were in the Pride together," McLaury says, marching under the direction of Leonard Haug.

McLaury's time with the Pride included trips to the Orange Bowl and he recalls one special occasion in South Bend "when we beat the tar out of Notre Dame." He added with a laugh "as long as I was in the band, we never lost a game."

McLaury's trumpet comes out of the case for the annual alumni band each year and he plays regularly with the New Horizon Band.

McLaury earned a master's degree in math from OU and taught for a time before returning to OU to work in the meteorology department.

"Then I started doing programming for different departments," and finally he took his computer skills into industry. He developed software for several commercial outfits, including a food broker. "I didn't even know what a food broker was when I got that job."

He now works for the Department of Education where he developed the software for the school lunch program and now oversees the computers that monitor the distribution of more than $40 million each year in lunch funds for day care homes and centers.

It was in the early 1970s when he got his first personal computer, a Zenith. Even having worked in the computer industry for nearly 50 years and having transitioned through several programming softwares, he isn't speculating on what the future holds.

"I hesitate to predict," the Lawton native said, but he believed it is possible that one day no one will use a keyboard with the computer responding to voice command, software that is in its infancy now.

"It works, but it will get much better. I have seen some of it (translation software) and it is hard to make sense of it. All of these things will get much better."

McLaury doesn't spend much time online on his own computer, preferring to spend free time with his collie Megabyte and playing handball. His wife Ann is also a computer programmer, working for Seagate Industries. He and their son Daniel, a recent OU graduate, are looking into joint ventures in the computer programming world.

        

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