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White to move and mate in two #619 — Mykonos, part 1 [1]

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Date: 2025-01-26

In 1982 when the 4-year contract for Westinghouse support of the F-16 radar in Amsterdam was up and all my colleagues returned to HQ in Baltimore... I had gone native by then, and decided to quit Westinghouse and stay put. I hired on as a circuit board designer with a subsidiary of a Canadian company based in Amsterdam that provided the information systems for Schiphol Airport. And somehow (though to this day I can't remember exactly how) they wangled me an oh-so-precious Dutch work permit. While working for them, I bumped into my eventual business partner in a bar in Amsterdam. Neil was a fiery Scotsman, and I'll always remember the first thing he ever said to me: "Steve, do you know anything about... computers"?

Neil was a former secondary school physics teacher back in Scotland, but he had learned how to program computers and was body-shopping programmers from the U.K. into the Netherlands because they were short on supply there; the reason being that by the time the Dutch programmers had gotten their Masters and PhD degrees in computing they were at least 26 years old. Younger whippersnappers like me with just a few years experience in industry could run circles around them. Neil was sub-contracting at Raytheon Data Systems (RDS hereafter) in Amsterdam. You mostly know Raytheon as being one of the biggest suppliers of military stuff like the Aim-9 "Sidewinder" missile and marine radar systems. But the Ratheon Data Systems division, headquartered in Boston, was making cheaper and much smaller knock-off clones of those hulking IBM-3270 CRT terminals that the airlines were using as check-in terminals. Neil tried to get me into RDS as a contractor, but at this stage he had already saturated them with contractors and they weren't having it. However... with my credentials (BS EE with 4 years experience programming F-16 test equipment), they offered to take me on as full time staff instead; a bit to Neil's chagrin, I imagine, because he didn't get his cut that way.

Our boss at RDS was a way cool Bostonian named Bob, who eventually taught me how to design operating systems. Sometime in 1983 he sent me to the Olympic Airways main office in Athens, Greece. We had just sold them a batch of 8 or so terminals to run as a demo network, and it wasn't working properly. So I was instructed to find out what had gone wrong (it was of course working fine when the network was first installed a few weeks before), and also to train their staff/answer questions. The office was quite posh, and the terminals were arranged in a circle on a big conference table in its own room. It took me less than 15 minutes to identify the problem. Each terminal had a set of 4 little toggle switches on the back to set its network address. So in binary notation, 1110 = 14 decimal, and someone had been messing with the switches because two of the terminals had both been set to this same address and were fighting against each other, taking down the whole network in the process. I noted the address of all the other terminals, set one of the conflicting ones to a free address, re-booted it and... everything was working again. I spent the next hour or so demoing our system to the now enthused office staff, then I phoned home to ask what I should do next and Bob said: "Steve, good job. Tell you what. You've been working hard, why don't you take a few days off and go visit one of the Greek islands"?

To be continued...

And now, on to tonight's puzzle. Below are links to an on-line board to help you work the puzzle, and the solution. But don't peek at the answer until you've made an honest attempt to solve the puzzle, or you'll spoil the fun!

On-line board

Solution

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