Bob Kirby

By the end of July, Naomi and the boys settled into our new home, and I went to work in the Management Analysis Division of the Comptroller’s office in DC. The chief of our division was a civil service employee who soon left for work in industry. Col. Bob Kirby, who had just graduated from Harvard Business School with a degree in Math, took his place. Our families became quite close and sometimes vacationed together. As a result, Bob and I have remained good friends through the years.

My assignment at the Pentagon was to work with a large-scale UNIVAC computer procured from Sperry-Rand to determine its usefulness to the Air Force. The computers of that day were massive machines that had to be kept isolated in a dust-free, climate-controlled environment. They were rigged up with hundreds of vacuum tubes that would often burn out, necessitating costly, time-consuming repairs. In addition, no computer language or software applications (apps) existed at the time. We had to resort to using tedious and cumbersome machine language to develop our own programs. Consequently,