The show’s guest in this episode is Melanie’s dad, Mel Parish. He spent his whole career at White Sands Missile Range. And he did a lot of early computer programming. He has a PhD in Physics. He’s been a member of Rotary. He’s a postal chess master. And in back in the day, he had top secret clearance.

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Experimenting with War Gaming with Mel Parish

I’m so excited to be here with you today. I’m Melanie Parish, and we’re live on the experimental leader podcast. And I am in my childhood home, which is super exciting. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about my identity a lot this week about, you know, I think about identities a lot. And I think about what identities I claim for myself in the summer, I was sort of having some conversations with friends, and we were challenging ourselves to think of sort of 10 identities we have and, and one of my identities is sort of about being a coach who coaches in a tech world. And that’s been really an evolving process.

And I coach leaders and top tech organizations and FAANG companies, and, you know, household name companies, people who influenced the tech world and, and I love that identity. And I have to think about what that means because I don’t write code. I’m not a hardware expert, but I do understand the thinking that goes behind, putting those things together, like putting, taking projects forward, and all of that. And I’ve been coaching in tech, for, you know, well over a decade, maybe more like 15 years now, and with people and clients, and I had someone who I coached, who was a CIO, CTO, and he said, you can coach in tech, because you think that way. And so, I’ve been doing it for a long time. But I have been recently thinking about, you know, my roots in with computers and tack, and they have, they all go back to my father, and I happen to be visiting him this week. So, I’ve asked him to be the guest on my show. So, I’m going to introduce him in just a minute. So, I’m super excited about that.

And I wanted to read you just a little bit because we’re doing this book club thing. So, I have the experimental leader here. And I want to read you just a little bit out of chapter two. So, in November, we’re going to do chapter two, talk about chapter two, just a little bit. And chapter two is called investigate like a scientist. And so, I wanted to read you just a little bit about from chapter two. So, every now and again, I get a chance to coach a new leader. And I’m reminded how scary it is to be put in a leadership position for the first time, you try to come up with a vision for what kind of leader you want to be. But you may not have a good role model for business leadership, you learn through trial and error and emulation. Some days, you know, you did it, right. Some days, you have no idea and some days you fail. And when I began coaching new leaders, many tell me they’re surprised by the loneliness of the position. And they feel that they, they don’t feel like they have the skills to do their jobs, they struggle to figure out how to do it right. Effective leadership is about being able to step back from your work environment and study its intricacies with curiosity and intent. Here’s a metaphor that may help you gain the perspective of an experimental leader. Think of yourself as a scientist and the people, projects and organization and all of the subject as your study. So that’s my reading for today.

And it’s really apropos because I want to introduce my father who is sitting right next to me, here he is. And he’s agreed for me to interview him today. But I want to tell you just a little bit about him. So, he just turned 80 in September, and but he spent his whole career at White Sands Missile Range. And he did a lot of early computer programming in his life. So, we want to talk about that. He has a PhD in physics that he got in 1970. He’s been a member of Rotary. He’s a postal chess master. And he can still work with everybody in my family at chess. And in back in the day, he had top secret clearance. And so, I’m going to ask him all sorts of questions about his career and his life in the early coding days.

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So welcome to my show, Dad. Thanks for being willing to do this crazy thing.

Where will she remember anything?

Well, there’s always that right. It’s a grand experiment, oil off track. Okay, well, that’s an easy question. I will ask easy questions. Well, the first question I have is, how did you end up at working at White Sands Missile Range?

Well, it was a very fortunate path to get here. When I graduated with my PhD, I thought I would be able to get a job anywhere. I was wrong. It was early in the wars in, in Vietnam going on at that time. And everybody was busy with that. And I couldn’t find a job. And but I happened to be crossing paths with a friend of mine. And he was headed for Houston, where he had found a job. And I asked him where he had that phone number that he had been out to see. And he gave me the name and number of the person he had talked to. And so I called up there, and they hired me over the phone. Well, I was delighted, and it was, but it was civil service. And not didn’t think I would, that didn’t sound very appropriate at that time. But I say, well, I’ll get a real job. When I get a chance, I didn’t think working for the government was the roof we’re out to be. So, I came out to I’ve placed near Las Cruces, New Mexico. And I got a place over on wherever the army had a large area can work in and practice their missiles and tanks and such on this missile range. And I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. And then it began to propagate into just a fantastically interesting occupation. I got paid to travel to Belgium and share our computer simulations with him that we had been building simulations of combat, so that the army could check out what they wanted to buy in a simulated battle. without going through the expensive real-life engagements.

Well hang on a second, because I’ve got a question. So, I recently heard, you know, sometime not very long ago, I realized that you had actually been when you first started there. You were programming on punch cards. Is that right?

Yes, that was it. And we were fortunate at the habitat point, getting a computer. They were just barely invented. But they were growing fast. And the way to communicate with the computer was a punched card. And it was kind of hard to produce those. And when you got them built? Well, I’ve got a tray full of here. What am I going to do with them, I have to carry them down to where this huge computer is. and hope it works. If it doesn’t, you go back and punch some more cards. So, it was not very efficient. But it was better than anything else. Every now and then you would lose one. And you’d have to figure out which one was missing and how to get a new one punched. Go back in. And then we had these trays that were put the cards in. And so, I happen to have a desk at the opposite end of the building where the computer was. So, you can find me carrying this big old tray of courage up and down the hallway. And which was a struggle, but it was better than anything else we had.

What and then what came after that. So, he’s, you know, did they come into work one day and say we’re not going to use that anymore or do they bring another computer in and said you can use both or fewer remember anything about that transition?

Well, it was as the computers improved, because they were so useful that a lot of people were working on developing it. And we were fortunate enough to buy some of the newer computers. But anyway, if we got the cards punched, we would card them down and see if it worked. And if it didn’t compile, right, and there were errors, then you had to take it all back and find out worth which one it was, and get a new card, put it in and card it back down there again.

Well, and then we went to because when I grew up, we had those green and white computer papers that would run you know, we would draw on that like paper. But on the back, there would be all these calculations that were from things you had run on the big supercomputers that took up I guess, a room or something…

No. they were they were big one room of the building that we were working in. But after a while, things got better. But there’s a few fairly unusual things that would happen. We got people working on computers and other places. Some are directly for the army. They were the programmers won a couple of states away. But they wanted to compare their simulation with combat, with our simulation.

I think, was that at Fort Hood, is that were that was?

Not that. That was in Kansas, okay. And so, they came down to compare their computer work with ours. And it was kind of unusual, because anytime we compared them, they would hurt for a while and then never be something would diverge. So, they’d have to figure out how to get farther down. So, they would ask us to take out some of our functions. So, it would match theirs rather than improve theirs to match ours. They were trying to get approval of their own computer. So, we had to stop a little bit sooner during the battle. So, they could match that. But if the next part of it was different, the S goes to per net part off.

So, we were having this conversation yesterday. And you were saying you know sometimes there’s we’re down to like a platoon or something but yours were down to a single vehicle or something and yours were very detailed, right. And so, they would turn off all those all that data that you had, so that yours looked like theirs.

Yeah, we would just stop the machine and Lauer’s. There’s work right up to there. And that would Okay. Well, then you have been running this next function came in, they didn’t have it.

Well, and you have a funny sign on your wall? Do you want to read it? It’s called Perishes first law.

Yeah, they were eager to prove that their work was as good as ours. And so, the process they went through was if we came to a difference, we would remove our part. So that you said now the models are the same This way they got to get the approval of the people who supplied the moment.

So, you’re so perishes first law reads, after you remove all the differences, the models are the same. Which I just love. I think that’s fantastic. Well, I want to just turn to so you were doing work that was in the end, I think this was in the mid 80s, around the time of War Games movie came out, which I loved, but and maybe I loved it because this was kind of in the water around our house, but you had what my brother describes as the best business card ever, which it said director of Wargaming for the US Army and what was the work that you were doing that I think you were sharing a lot with the US allies and all of that you alluded to that earlier. But what were you doing then?

Well, our leadership up in the Pentagon area, wanted to share this capability with our allies, so that we could talk to people on the same level. And how, what, what a sound like a very difficult playing, but it was a real pleasure for me to share it with them, because they picked me to travel over there and help them set up computers, because they had people come to our place, and see how we did things, and had the software to do it. Consequently, we traveled there. And in the process, we got more and more military involved directly with us. And they had some knowledge of the computers, but they weren’t programmers, and they didn’t have it all. So, we had to be able to present our work and halfway out what it made to the officers in the army, so that we could get as much validity into the work as we could. And we had to explain this to some people who had not much had, it did not have much experience with computers, or how they were built, or how they worked. So, what happens was, when they were comparing their computers, which were not as detailed as ours, and to see how, how well they work, they picked ours as a standard. And they were trying to make those equal to that. So, we’ve had officers involved in that, but they weren’t really knowledgeable of the computers and how they were.

Well, and you got to go to England, the UK and you got to go to France, and you’ve got to go to Australia, you got to go to all sorts of places kind of like the shortlist of the US allies you got to go and work personally with.

But there’s one particular thing that captured on a slogan referring to one of our one of our officers wanted to compare it to they’re tier own work and their measurements. So, we were up at his place one time. And he was trying to get the things to match.

Yeah, I think we talked I think we already talked about this data. Okay. Yeah, I think we already talked about this. I want to talk just for a second before we end here about, I don’t know if you can remember, but we always had like that when they first started coming out with home computers. We always had, you know, you know, first we had a word processor. And that was pretty nifty, because you could, you know, write a paper or something. But then we had the first Apple computers and Commodore computers in our house. And I’m just wondering if you remember how you thought about that, like why it was important to have a computer at home in those early days.

It was a fresher way to do things, if you could convey the process of producing the data. So, as we got better and better at that we were a really big shrinkage of machines that could do this. We went from things that take up a room to make a few calculations down to things that we could carry around in our pockets. And so, it was a great pleasure to find that utility available. And I and in very importantly, a lot cheaper.

Well, and I don’t think I gave the dates that you were at White Sands in your when I introduced you, but you were there, from 1970 to 2004. So just thinking about the incredible changes in computers, you know, from, you know, from computers that took up a room to smartphones, you know, in that timeframe just is so amazing. I don’t I don’t actually I don’t suppose there were smartphones, but there were cellular phones by then. And, and laptop computers and all of that. And one of my favorite memories is of you in the 1990s. And I remember where we were, and you had a laptop and you said, well, I had to get a new laptop, and I lost all my email. And I as a young, you know, just getting out of college person was like, oh, no, that’s terrible. What did you do? And you said, nothing. They if they needed me, they found me again. And it wasn’t a big deal. And that has just stayed with me my whole career. Like if somebody needs you, again, they’ll find you don’t make your email, the most important thing. And so, I just love that. So, thank you so much for being on my show today. It’s been really fun to get to talk to you about all those good old days.

Well, I hope you enjoyed it. I things are tremendously different now. And that’s good, really good that it’s got you better. And but we had to have had some difficulty with an officer one time and led me to think that I could lead him to the data.

That’s great, Dad. Thank you. Thank you.

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Well, it has been just a joy to be with my dad today. And his, you know, heart of the scientists with that PhD in physics growing up around him, you know, really makes me want to challenge you to think about where you need to be experienced, experimenting in your life, where you need to be stretching where you need to be looking at new ways to use the technology that’s evolving. This is Melanie Parish. It’s been great being with you today. Go experiment!

Mel Parish

Mel Parish just turned 80 in September, and but he spent his whole career at White Sands Missile Range.

And he did a lot of early computer programming in his life.

He has a PhD in physics that he got in 1970.

He’s been a member of Rotary.

He’s a postal chess master.

And in back in the day, he had top secret clearance.

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