After taking a brief detour last week for a political rant, this week we return to more stories about my college days as a computer science major at IUPUI. We begin a multi-part series about my mentor and favorite professor Dr. John Gersting.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 63 of Contemplating Life.

After taking a brief detour last week for a political rant, this week we return to more stories about my college days as a computer science major at IUPUI. I want to talk about my mentor and favorite professor Dr. John Gersting.

We will start with my fifth semester. According to my transcript, I took American History H105 to help fill part of my liberal arts requirements for a School of Science degree. In general, I always hated history in grade school and high school because I could never remember dates. You give me an event and I can explain most of its political and sociological significance. On the contrary, if you ask me when it occurred unless it was the War of 1812 I am probably clueless. Even though I was terrible at history, US history was my strongest area and I managed to earn a B for the course. I believe this was the last class I took at the downtown campus. Everything else going forward was on 38th St. for the rest of my college days.

The transcript says, I took Elementary Linear Algebra MATH 351 and earned a C. I took Physics 251 titled Heat, Electricity, and Optics but I remember it mostly having to deal with optics. I don’t recall who taught it but I enjoyed it and earned a B. And most important another programming class. I took CS 320 Programming 2 from Dr. John Gersting.

Before I tell you about that class with Dr. Gersting, I need to tell you of a couple of encounters I had with him before I ever took a class from him.

On the third floor of the K-building, there was a small room about the size of a large supply closet called the “Calculations Lab.” I first spoke about it in episode 43. At one end sat an ASR 33 Teletype that was connected to the university’s DEC-System-10 computer. I’ve talked previously that we used to go in there and play text-based computer games of different types. There were also several very expensive programmable calculators on a table in the room.

One day, I wrote a program in the computer language known as BASIC to see how long it would take to count to 1 million. It had 6 loops that counted from 1 to 10. The loops were nested inside one another so the entire process would eventually count to 1 million. It would print out a message every 100,000 to let me know how it was doing.

While the program was running, someone sat down at one of the tables and began using a programmable calculator. I thought he was a teacher but I wasn’t sure. He was behind me I could only see him out of the corner of my eye. I’m pretty sure I asked if he needed the teletype because I always did that when I was goofing off. I might not have asked this guy because he went straight for the calculator. A few minutes later, one of my friends walked in and asked what I was doing, “What are you up to? Playing Star Trek again?”

“No,” I replied. I wrote a program to count to 1 million and I’m seeing how long it takes to run. Do you need the machine?”

“No. I was just going to goof around myself. Let me know how it turns out.”

“Will do.”

After about 20 or 30 minutes, I gave up. It had not yet even reached 100,000.

Now you might ask, “Aren’t computers faster than that?” Well, this program was written in BASIC which is an interpreted language. That means every time it reads a statement written in the BASIC language, it has to parse each statement every time it is executed and figure out what it means. This is in contrast to programs written in languages like FORTRAN in which the program is read once by a compiler, translated into machine language, and that machine language is what actually executes. In other words, BASIC is ungodly slow. Who knows. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere and the thing was caught in an infinite loop and never was going to finish.

Fast-forward to sometime later… maybe a month or so I don’t recall. I was hanging out with my friend Dennis Adams one day. We introduced you to Dennis back in episode 26. He was my friend from high school who first got me involved in computers by carrying a teletype machine downstairs from the math department at Northwest High School so that I could use a computer for the first time. Dennis is a year older than me so he had already been at IUPUI in the computer science department for a year before I arrived.

Dennis was working on an independent study project with one of the professors and he needed to stop by his office to drop something off. Dennis said, “I’m working with Dr. John Gersting. You will eventually get lots of classes with him. I really like him a lot and I think you’ll like him too.” An endorsement from Dennis was high praise so I was anxious to meet the guy but I waited outside his office while Dennis went in. The professor was either talking to another professor or was on the phone talking to them – I couldn’t tell. He was speaking in a loud and gruff voice saying, “Yeah it’s no wonder the system runs so damn slow. We’ve got all these idiots in there playing games and running programs to count to 1 million just to see how long it takes!”

Oh, shit! He was the guy using the programmable calculator the day I was in there trying to run 1 million loops. I was going to have this guy for many of my programming classes and he already had a terrible opinion of me. I was doomed.

That was sometime during my first or second year. But now it was time to actually take a class with Dr. Gersting and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

On the first day, it was a slight relief to note that his loud voice and somewhat gruff manner were his normal state. He was a tall slim man with sandy brown hair. He wore a bolo tie with a turquoise clasp. I believe he was also wearing boots. With this Southwestern attire, he reminded me a little bit of Clint Eastwood perhaps as his iconic character Dirty Harry. I later learned that Gersting studied at Arizona State University but I don’t know if that’s where he’s from originally. But that explains his Southwest attire.

The first day of class he gave a big speech about how demanding he was going to be. I could imagine him saying, “Go ahead make my day. Fail my class.”

Although he looked like Clint Eastwood, that opening speech was also reminiscent of another iconic grumpy character from one of my favorite films. The 1973 movie “The Paper Chase” was about a first-year Harvard law student named Mr. Hart. In that film, John Hausman portrayed a harish and demanding contract law professor named Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. Hausman won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role. Much-deserved. On the first day of class, Kingsfield famously delivers a monologue in which he says, “You teach yourselves the law but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”

Gersting’s speech was quite similar, especially in a similar speech he gave the following semester for my Programming 3 class. In that class, he handed us a textbook that he had written. It wasn’t a professionally published textbook rather it was of stack of Xeroxed pages bound together with a paper fastener.

He declared, “I’m not going to teach you this course. You are going to teach it to yourself. I wrote this book. Everything you need to know is in this book. I’m not going to read it to you. I’m not going to lecture from it. Some teachers supplement the book with their lectures but everything you need is in the book. If there was something else you needed to know I would’ve put it there.

“When you complete a chapter, you come into class and take a quiz. You must pass the quiz with a 100% score. If you do not pass 100% you cannot continue. Why would I let you go on to the next topic when you have not yet mastered the previous topic? There are three versions of each quiz. If you fail all three of them, then we will sit down and have a long talk about whether or not you should be in this class.

“One of the reasons you are going to teach yourselves this course is that that’s what will happen in the real world. The minute you leave this institution with your degree, most of what we taught you will be obsolete because the computer industry is evolving so quickly. And even if it doesn’t change, every computer facility has its own standards and procedures. You will have to deal with existing programs that have been written by other people and you will have to learn what that code does. The first day when you walk into a job they’re going to hand you a pile of computer manuals about 2 feet thick and they are going to say, ‘Here… learn this.’ I’m not going to teach you programming. I’m going to teach you to teach yourselves programming.”

In other words, he was saying just what Kingsfield said in that film. “You teach yourselves to write code but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a programmer.”

John Hausman reprised his role as Prof. Kingsfield in a TV series also called “The Paper Chase.” In the opening episode, Mr. Hart was unprepared for the first day of class. He was expecting a lecture but didn’t realize that a reading assignment had been posted on the bulletin boards in the dormitories and he was expected to have read material before the first class. When Kingsfield discovered that Mr. Hart was unprepared he placed over him an imaginary burial shroud.

Kingsfield: You see this.This is a shroud, Mr. Hart. A shroud. A burial garment. A winding sheet. For the dead. This is for you, Mr. Hart. The late Mr. Hart.

After that, Kingsfield refused to engage Mr. Hart in any of the Socratic dialogue sessions in the class.

Even though I didn’t make any giant mistakes the first day of class like Mr. Hart did, I felt like I already had a strike against me after Kingsfield… Whoops I mean… after Gersting had already branded me as an idiot who just wanted to play games and run a million loops to see how long it would take.

I linked a scene from the movie version of “The Paper Chase” as well as the entire first episode of the TV series which I found on YouTube. You will find the links in the description.

The first programming class I had with Dr. Gersting was CS 320 Programming 2. It taught us additional programming skills in FORTRAN. The primary purpose however was to show how to work in a group setting. We had a massive programming project that would take us the entire semester to complete.

Each year, Gersting came up with a different programming project for his class to work on. One previous year they wrote a piece of software to do the scoring for a car collectors show. Gersting had a collection of a couple of classic Ford Thunderbirds. He had restored the cars in his spare time and would show them off at classic car meets. The scoring system for these competitions was quite complex so he had his class write the software to handle the task. It was free labor. He probably could’ve written the program himself in a few days but it was a good project for the class.

This year, however, we had a completely different project. We were going to create a simulated computer. The project was called IPICS which stood for Indiana Purdue at Indianapolis Computer Simulator.

Gersting had invented an imaginary computer that used its own machine language that he also invented. The set of machine language instructions illustrated the variety of types of machine instructions that you would find in a real computer. It was designed to teach computer hardware architecture to future generations of computer science students. Our job was to bring this imaginary machine to life not with actual circuits but as a simulation.

The project was divided up into different tasks and we worked in groups of 2-4 students each. We had to create and test our portion of the code and write it to an overall standard that he established. Then, near the end of the semester, one representative from each team met with him on a Saturday afternoon as he took all of our different pieces of code written independently and tried to link them together into one massive program. It was an excellent example of how large programming projects work in the real world.

As I refer, my team which I think consisted of only two people was the smallest group with one of the smallest tasks. We had to simulate input and output processes. We had to translate numbers and letters from an internal system to standard ASCII characters and output them to the terminal. For input, we had to take ASCII text and translate it into the internal format used by the computer.

Throughout the semester, Gersting lightened up and you could joke around with him. He was a much nicer guy than he appeared that day. I remember the day we all gathered to integrate all of our pieces of the program. Someone in the computer room was showing off something they had produced on the computer’s plotter. A plotter was a computer-controlled device that had a pen mounted in it and a roll of tracing paper. The computer would move the paper forward and backward and move the pen side-to-side while lifting it up and down. You could use it to draw anything. It was sort of like a computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch. It was mostly used for graphing mathematical functions. I had played around with it a little bit just for fun and not as a part of any assignment. I was already interested in computer graphics that early in my career.

I joked with the other students, “One of these days I’m going to use the computer plotter to draw an image of a Russian flag. Then I’m going to smear it with dirt. I will frame it and label it, ‘This is a dirty commie plot’” Gersting let out a loud groan at my terrible pun. It proved to me he did have a sense of humor after all.

After an hour or so, he got the program to compile and link as a single module. It wouldn’t do very much but it worked. The next step of the process was to write an operating system. There was a method to partition the memory into different areas. The operating system would run in protected memory and the application program would run in general memory.

I went to Gersting and asked him if he would take me on in an independent study course where my goal would be to write the operating system for IPICS. He agreed.

So, for my sixth semester, I had CS 490 ”Topics in CS for Undergrads” as well as CS 461 “Programming 3” both with Dr. John Gersting. We will talk about that in next week’s episode. In fact it’s probably going to take a couple of more episodes to tell the entire story of my relationship with this amazing man and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting who was also a CS professor and eventually appointed chairman of the department.

The Gerstings moved to Hawaii and taught there for a while but then returned to Indianapolis and are currently still serving as professor emeritus in the computer and information sciences program.

So stay tuned for more of the Gersting Chronicles.

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