Clas Grägg, cont.
Soon we obtained our Wegematic 1000. Already in March we had attended a 20 hour course held by lecturers from the Wenner-gren Center. The programs were written in hexadecimal machine code. No floating point operations were available and one had to keep track of the exponential part of the number. Also, there were no subroutines, for instance for the trigonometric functions.However, rather complicated mathematical computations that had not before been possible to compute by hand could be made.
In 1961 I participated as a "programming expert" in a project at TY led by Dr. Erkki Euranto. The task was to determine some coefficients in a non-linear systems of equations by using some sort of least squares procedure. The system described a chemical equilibrium state. Wegematic needed 8 hours to produce a solution.
At this time we also had some lose ideas to offer programming aid for possibly earning some money. As an example Jaakko Mäkelä an I had some contacts with the Electricity Department of Turku to discuss automatic invoicing. Some programming and testing was made. However, the input and output of the extensive data was not feasible. The time was not yet ripe.
Perhaps it had been possible to start an own activity in programming if one had been more business minded. I did not then realize this, perhaps because of cowardice. It was more secure to be employed.
I remember that it was very exciting to get hands on experience in programming the new mathematic machines. I clearly got inspiration to look for a job where the new technique could be made use of. Prof. Fogel helped me to get a trainee position in Summer 1960 at AB Atomenergi (now Studsvik AB) in Stockholm, where a section on Numerical Analysis under the leadership of Kalevi Loimaranta had been established for development of computation methods and programs within the new atom (later nuclear) technique. At the time we were about 10 employees.
In the Autumn I got a permanent position. Later three study mates from Åbo Akademi joined: Bo Eriksson, Kim Lindblom and Kurt Pörn. Aimo Törn was also a trainee in the Summer 1961. All were members of the Fradga (Froth) Group (An unofficial mathematics student group).
The writer is in Spring 2000 still working at Studsvik AB.