This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 70 of Contemplating Life.

This week we return to my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science.

It’s been a couple of episodes since we talked about this so I’ll briefly recap. Back in Episode 64, I recounted stories surrounding my sixth semester at IUPUI which was one of the toughest ones I had. I got lost in quantum mechanics and had to drop a physics class. I barely passed an advanced calculus class with a D. I struggled to complete all the programs required for Programming 3 under Dr. John Gersting, Finally, I did a significantly substandard job in a one-on-one independent study project with Mr. Dr. G.

I recounted that I got off to a rocky start with It is rife, Mrs. Dr. Judith Gersting but once we got going, I had a great time in her very challenging class in my seventh semester. I bounced back from that bad year earning an “A” in her class. It was called Discrete Computer Structures CS 482. It was followed up with a companion class CS 484 Computability Theory the following semester with Mrs. Dr. G. which was also quite challenging. I earned a “B” in the follow-up class. I can’t recall which lessons were in which semester. They kind of blurred together.

I should mention that for some time it was obvious I wasn’t going to finish in four years. It was going to take at least one additional semester to get all my requirements. I spoke with the people at Indiana Vocational Rehabilitation and they agreed they could continue to fund me through nine semesters.

My seventh-semester transcript from the fall of 1976 shows that I also took a class called “Arch of Computers CS 402.” Presumably “Arch” was an abbreviation for “Architecture”. It was about the inner workings of computer hardware. When I saw that on my transcript I initially had little or no recollection of that class. I thought that everything I learned about computer hardware was in my first programming class with Dr. Larry Hunter. I told you about jokes that I wrote for him to use in class. Now that I think about it more, there is a good chance those computer hardware jokes I wrote for Dr. Hunter were actually in this CS 402 class. Keep in mind we’re talking about events over 45 years ago. My memory is not very good. The transcript shows I earned a “B”.

This explains a mystery that arose when discussing my college days with my friend Rich. Rich remembers that Dr. Hunter planned his lessons so well that everything he had to write on the blackboard would exactly fit the amount of space available. The blackboards spanned the entire front wall of the classrooms perhaps 20-25 feet wide. One day, we came into class and someone had written something on the far lower right of the blackboard in an area about 3 x 3 feet, drew a box around it, and wrote, “Do not erase.” Hunter was quite frustrated. When he got to the end and needed that extra space, he went back to the upper left side of the blackboard and erased an area of his own work exactly the size of the “Do not erase” area that was in the lower right of the blackboard. He continued writing his notes for the lesson which exactly filled the space. Rich reminded me of that story and he thought that it was Dr. Hunter and I recalled it as well. However, I know for certain that Rich and I did not take CS 220 together because that was in my first year and Rich wasn’t at IUPUI until the following year. So the whole thing took place in CS 402 including the jokes I wrote for Dr. Hunter.

Moving along, the transcript also shows a class called Numerical Methods CS 414. There are some mathematical equations that you cannot solve directly. But using computers, you can approximate the answer, then figure out how big your error is, and then make another guesstimate that is closer. There are slow ways to do it that get your answer eventually but this was a class about advanced ways of solving such equations more efficiently. I enjoyed the course. I remember the guy who taught it but I can’t remember his name.

This course would prove somewhat useful in later years when I worked on an open-source graphics rendering program called the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer or POV-Ray for short. Some of the calculations used in ray tracing involve solving high-order polynomial equations using numerical methods. I wasn’t able to apply any of the lessons I’ve learned in this numerical methods class to improve the calculations in POV-Ray but it did help me understand how the rendering program worked. There were other lessons I learned later in college that I was able to apply to the ray tracing program and I will talk about that later.

The remaining class I took that semester was Oscillations and Waves Physics 322. I don’t remember a lot about the class itself but I remember one particularly enjoyable lab experiment we did using a spectrometer.

We’ll think of ordinary lights as being white. In fact, is made up of many different colors of light that can be seen when passing the light through a prism or an etched piece of class known as a diffraction grating. Light consists of electromagnetic waves and the frequency of the wave is perceived by us as its color. A spectrometer splits light into its component frequencies.

Astronomers use spectrography to study what elements are in distant stars and galaxies. Different chemical elements create distinct bands in a spectrograph as the atoms are excited and emit light at specific frequencies. Also, light passing through elements is absorbed in particular bands which appear as dark lines in a spectrograph. For example, the new James Webb Space Telescope looks at starlight as it passes through the atmospheres of extrasolar planets to see what chemicals are in the atmosphere of those planets. Scientists hope to use this information to detect telltale signs of life on these planets by understanding what chemicals are in the atmosphere.

For this lab experiment, we had a collection of gas-filled tubes about 8 inches long and a half inch in diameter. They looked like small neon tubes and in fact one of them did contain neon. You placed them in a socket that would electrically charge them and they would glow in various colors. We would pass that light through a small slit and then onto a diffraction grating. This would split the light into a rainbow of narrow bands. We would measure how much each band was deflected. There was a very long calculation that you would use to compute the deflection angle and that would tell you the frequency of each color band. We would look that up in a table of the frequency bands for known substances and identify what kind of gas was in the tube.

The calculation took about 30 steps on a scientific pocket calculator. I had recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard HP 21 calculator using the money I made by ghost-writing programs for another student who could not complete their assignments by the end of the semester.

One of my classmates, a physics major named John, had the more sophisticated HP 25C programmable calculator. You could program in the formula, enter one or two raw numbers, hit the “run” button, and a few seconds later you had your answer without manually punching in about 30 steps to do the calculations. I said to John, “I bet you sure are enjoying that programmable calculator. It would make this calculation a breeze.”

“I haven’t learned how to use the programmability feature yet. I’m just using it as an ordinary calculator,” he replied.

I was shocked. I said, “Well then trade me calculators for a few minutes. Use my HP 21 and I’ll program your 25.”

He agreed.

Without ever reading a manual on how to program it, I figured it out, programmed in the calculation, put a couple of constant values into two of the registers, entered the raw numbers from each of my observations, hit run, and out came my answer. My lab partner and I finished the entire process in about half the time of anyone else in the room. I thought about deleting the program before swapping calculators back with John but instead, I was gracious and showed him how to run the program so he could complete the rest of his calculations quickly.

This caused me to conclude that there ought to be a worthiness test before you can buy certain electronic gadgets. People who don’t know how to use an advanced calculator ought not to be able to purchase one unless they know what it can do for them.

I feel the same way sometimes about personal computers, 3D printers, cable TV boxes, and smart TVs. I guess I just get jealous when people have better equipment than I can afford but they don’t know how to make full use of it. It seems a waste.

The other situation that freaks me out is when someone buys a new high-tech toy like a computer or a laptop and they don’t take it out of the box for days. They ought to put a timer in such boxes that if you don’t open them and set them up within 24 hours they self-destruct like a Mission Impossible tape recording.

Overall this seventh semester was a good one. I ended up with 4 Bs and an A.

Several times over this podcast, I’ve confessed to some pretty bad attitudes I’ve had and some not-so-noble behavior. We now come to another such story.

There were two different computer departments at IUPUI. I was in computer science designated by the letters CS or sometimes CSCI offered by the School of Science. But there was also a School of Technology that offered a Computer Technology degree abbreviated CPT.

Some of the computer science majors tended to look down on computer technology majors. We were pretty arrogant. Or at least I was and I know there were many others. Our programming classes were heavily geared towards science, engineering, mathematics, and theory. We also concentrated on what is called systems programming. We learned how to write compilers, assemblers, and operating system software. It’s the computer science people who wrote Windows and they wrote the programs that made it possible to write Windows. Computer science people also write application programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, and database managers.

Computer technology classes were focused heavily on business applications written in languages like COBOL and PL/1. COBOL is an acronym standing for COmmon Business Oriented Language. It handles the grunt work of taking data in, which is formatted in a particular way, and producing reports formatted in a particular way. About 80% of a COBOL program is just getting the data in and getting the results back out and only about 20% is devoted to actual calculations.

PL/1 was a programming language invented by IBM designed to combine both business and scientific applications in one language. In the end, it was sort of a bastard child that was not well accepted by either group. The scientific programmers thought it looked too much like COBOL. The business programmers thought it looked too much like FORTRAN or ALGOL. It was also supposed to be good for systems programming such as operating systems and compilers but even IBM had to invent a modified version of the language called PL/S for systems programming because PL/I.

I mentioned previously that one of my classmates had to drop out of school to take a job because his family needed the money. He was going to write COBOL for an insurance company and that was considered a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel low-level job for a big bad computer science major. That was the kind of job computer technology people took. Many of the computer science people felt such work was beneath us.

My buddy Frank was in CPT rather than CS and I often wondered why he took what I thought was the lesser road. The truth is CPT students were just as smart as the CS students but there was a rivalry there born out of arrogance. They probably thought us to be a bunch of elitist snobs… which we were.

I’m not at all proud of that condescending attitude. I don’t mean to say that everyone in computer science felt that way but I am confident many did.

It wasn’t just academic arrogance on my part. I just thought that systems programming as well as scientific and engineering programming would be much more interesting than business-oriented programming. I thought there were good opportunities for me in that field. There is a facility on the east side of Indianapolis called Naval Avionics. They make weapon systems for the US military and would likely hire someone like me with a computer science degree and a second major in physics. I also might be destined for a job with a pharmaceutical company like Eli Lilly however I had no experience in chemistry. So, that might be a problem.

Of course, at the time, no one knew how big personal computers would be and that PC software would be my primary focus.

Although we studied business programming languages COBOL and PL/1 in Dr. John Gersting’s Bible study class (recall that we referred to his textbook as the Bible), we only spent a couple of weeks on each of those languages. I felt the amount of time we devoted to them was indicative of their perceived value to us.

I remember we had a humorous poem we passed around that was the ABCs of computer science. I only remember a couple of verses. One of them was, “C is for COBOL. Oh, what a pity. It was designed by a committee.”

The other one I recall was, “L is for languages. Using these three: Fortran, Pascal, and RPG. Avoid all others and my friends shun, those with the suffix L slash One.”

Even though I looked down on business-related programming and the entire CPT department, I thought I needed a fallback plan in case I couldn’t get a scientific or engineering programming job. So for my eighth semester, I took two courses in computer technology. One was the dreaded COBOL CPT 265 and the other was in the only slightly less dreaded PL/I CPT 360. I found them very boring. I never had any use for anything I learned in either of the classes. I got a “B” in the PL/I class. Much to my shock, my transcript says I dropped the COBOL class. I don’t remember doing that. I thought the physics class I dropped was the only one. I must’ve dropped it pretty early because I don’t remember much at all about the COBOL class.

In my eighth and ninth semesters, I began taking graduate-level courses. These courses are numbered in the 500-600 range. Some people warned me, “Don’t do that because if you come back for your Master’s or PhD you won’t have enough classes available. You will have already taken everything they have to offer.” As I mentioned previously, the computer science department was quite new. The curriculum was not very extensive. They only offered a minimal number of courses to complete the degree. My reply was, “I’m not in this for academic glory. For me, this is just job training. I could’ve gone to a technical school to learn programming or gotten a CPT degree but I figure that given my disability I need every advantage I can get. I want the prestige of that Bachelor of Science degree but once I get that, I’m headed straight for the workforce and never going back.”

In my eighth semester in addition to the 2 CPT classes I took CS 502 Compile and Prog Systems which I don’t know exactly what that involved. The title is so abbreviated in the transcript, I can’t make sense of it. I also took that second semester of computability theory with Mrs. Dr. G.

My final class in my eighth semester was Statistics 511. It covered both probability and statistics which I thought I might need someday for simulations and for data analysis. It was taught by a graduate student or teaching assistant who lived in Bloomington and would commute to Indianapolis to teach the class two evenings per week. Note that a semester is 15 weeks long. At about the second week, he asked if the class would agree to meet for a double class once a week. We all agreed. We had some nasty weather that winter and on at least two occasions he canceled class because he couldn’t make it up from Bloomington. I don’t remember if those cancellations were single or double classes.

On the evenings when he did manage to show up, he generally only kept us for about a class and a half. My guess is that we ended up with barely 50% of the amount of class time we should have had. I would also guess we only covered a third of the material in the course. We didn’t get around to the midterm exam until about two-thirds of the way through the class and I think he never did give us a final exam. He just used our midterm grade as our final grade. Most of what we covered was probability. We didn’t get very far into statistics. Being a lifelong poker player I already knew a lot about probability. For me, it was an easy “A”. It’s a good thing I never needed anything that was supposed to be taught in the class.

The biggest thing that happened in my eighth semester was that I started applying for legitimate jobs as a programmer. We’ll talk about that experience in the next episode wherein my mentor Dr. John Gersting plays a key role.

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