A Working SIP: Kellogg Biological Research Station
Abstract
From the period of September 20th through December
20th I participated in an internship at the Kellogg
Biological Research Station (KBS) as a software developer.
My Supervisor, John Gorentz, is the system manager of the
station's VAX 11/760. Just before I arrived, John had
lost his assistant within the computer department and was
operating as the only computer staff member. John's
duties included everything at the station remotely related
to computers. Along with completely wiring a new academic
building for terminals, running a microcomputer classroom,
maintaining the research station's computerized weather
stations and the databases connected with them and all the
other duties of a system manager, John had also created a
vast system of subroutine libraries to perform many tasks
at KBS. Although John admits software development is
probably his favorite task, with his workload he no longer
had the time to work on any new projects. Hence, he
requested funds for an additional employee and my
internship began. I was to develop a few of the projects
John knew the station needed but that he did not have the
time to work on. My intership concentrated on three different
projects:
WNOW (Weather NOW), a subroutine which displays
current weather conditions on a terminal screen, updating
the display every ten seconds.
WNWS (Weather National Weather Service), a system of
manually inserting data collected for the National Weather
Service and allowing system users access to well formatted
output of the data.
TRANSFORM, a system of Transforming data stored in
one database into the format of another.