Original publication date: December 1991 Heurikon Historical Highlights A series of articles for The Horizon Oscar Mayer & Company Going to visit a customer’s site to install a computer? You just haven’t lived until you’ve had to slug your way through an endless moving line of 400-pound hog carcasses that are hanging by their toes in various states of, ah, “disassembly,” while you simultaneously fight the urge to look around out of fear you might actually see something — the other times you did that (look around) your eyes found a room full of organic swine horrors, like dangling pig heads, piles of steamy-fresh stomach parts, and vats of other mysterious entrails. Oh, sorry — were you eating lunch? Let’s back up and start again.
Our second major project was with Oscar Mayer & Company. In the late 1970s, Oscar Mayer was still slaughtering hogs here in Madison. After the hogs were dispatched, the eviscerated carcasses moved past a workstation where two people (called “graders”) keyed in quality values for each carcass. An electronic scales provided the hog’s weight, which was recorded on paper tape along with the grade information. Twice each day, the paper tape was gathered up (sometimes off the floor) and fed into their IBM mainframe computer. Oscar Mayer used the hog data as feedback for their buyers and to compute the payments for the farmer-producers. The hog data was also passed through a selection matrix that would turn on certain indicator lights, thus telling the graders how to mark the carcass. The marks indicated how the meat should be most profitably cut — as in bacon, baloney, or ham. The Hot Carcass Data Acquisition System Mike Werlein, the project engineer at Oscar Mayer, originally just wanted to replace their old mechanical stepper switches with an electronic version. But, when we saw their existing system (a hideous mass of switches, relays, and noisy paper tape punches), it was apparent they needed much more than just a simple stepper replacement. So, we proposed an electronic replacement with a modern eight-inch floppy disk drive (to temporarily store the hog data) and a modem interface (so the data could be sent directly to the mainframe). The first electronic system used our MLP-8080 microcomputer board (as usual) and was installed at the Oscar Mayer plant in Davenport, Iowa. The box was about the size of a large microwave oven, mainly because it included a huge Shugart floppy disk controller board that was as big as the cabinet’s cover! Today, that functionality is on a single chip.
After the Davenport system was operating, they asked us to build three more, but they wanted a backup disk drive, the ability to manually input and modify the grading matrix, and a few other bells and whistles. This time, we proposed a full rack of equipment and a custom software package. The most unusual aspect of the new design was that the stainless steel data entry keyboards and displays had to withstand attack by greasy hog fat and direct hits during the daily steam cleaning.
We had planned to write the application code for the hog scales in BASIC, but first we needed to write a BASIC interpreter for our MLP-8080. That, however, turned out to be a horrendous task. We spent all of our development schedule working on the interpreter, never quite getting it right, and had no time left over to write the hog program itself. After a few months, we convened a meeting at Oscar Mayer, and Chris and I told their project team that we made a big mistake in our planning, wanted to start over on the software, and would they please wait for us and not cancel the order, thank-you, OK? The Oscar Mayer people had a brief private meeting, after which one of them asked: “So, how much more will this cost us?” Whew! That was a relief. We feared they would just kick us out and cancel the project. “Nothing more, same price,” we said, wondering if our original quotation might have been a bit too low. “This was our mistake and we’ll stand by our quote.” “OK, fellows, go do it. And, please get it right this time!” Good Recommendations A few months later, we were pursuing other customers who asked us for some references. Figuring one happy customer would beget another, I called Mike and said, “Mike, we’re wondering if you would be willing to be a business reference for us. May we give your name to our prospects?” We were still behind schedule on the Oscar Mayer project, but they were happy with the work we had done to that point (one of the units had been installed was working fine), and they would certainly want to help us stay in business. “Sure,” Mike said, “I’d be happy to talk with them. Let me get your file.” There was a pause as Mike rolled his chair over to his file cabinet. “Let’s see,” he continued, “where did I put your file? Oh yes, here it is — under ‘d’.” I asked Mike why in the world would he put his Heurikon file under ‘d’. “‘D’ — for disaster, of course!” Well, he must have given us a good reference because we got the other business — and eventually more from Mike, too. More of our fancy hog scale systems were installed at the Oscar Mayer plants in Perry, Iowa, and Beardstown and Momence, Illinois. (Madison never got one.) The Momence unit is still in operation, which might make it the oldest Heurikon system still in use. But, alas, Mike says they plan to retire the hog line there at the end of this year, just as they have already done at the others. NEXT MONTH: O-P-Cue-R-S-T, or how we learned to cue up. [SIDEBAR] Pranksters at Oscar Mayer One day, while installing our equipment at their Beardstown, Illinois, plant, I returned from lunch and found a few dozen hog eyeballs stuck to our keyboard enclosure. They were round, white, and (apparently) sticky — I think they were still warm. I did my best to pretend that nothing unusual was going on — as if I had to work my way around eyeballs like that all the time back at the office. Out of the corner of my eye, however, I could see the burly meat cutters (swinging knives with one hand and wearing steel-mesh gloves on the other) glancing over at me and enjoying a good snicker at the expense of the city dude. |
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