This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science. We also cover my final semester and my work at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 74 of Contemplating Life.

This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science. We also cover my final semester and my work at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

I had three courses that semester. Systems Programming CS 403 was a course on operating systems. In it, we learned about the hierarchy of software in a computer.

At the lowest level, your computer has something called a BIOS. That is an acronym for Basic Input and Output System. It is stored in permanent, read-only memory. It is completely hardware-specific to your particular machine. For example, it will poll your keyboard to see if you are pressing a key, and if so, grab the keystroke and pass it along to the other software. In those days, personal computers were completely text-based. There was no graphical interface like Windows or Mac OS. So, the BIOS would handle sending characters to the screen. It would send characters to your printer. Also, it would handle the lowest-level functions of reading and writing data to a floppy disk or hard disk. It didn’t organize the data into files or manage directories. That’s for the actual operating system to handle.

Above the BIOS in the hierarchy is the kernel. It creates and manages the file system on your discs, loads programs into memory, and performs memory management on operating systems that allow more than one program to run simultaneously.

Then, there are utility programs. In a text-based operating system, commands such as copying files, modifying file permission, displaying directory listings, etc., are often handled by utility programs, even though they seem to be commands issued to the operating system itself.

The top layer is your application program. That’s your word processor, spreadsheet, database manager, and later, Internet browsers. The course explained how all of these processes communicate with one another and who does what at each level.

As I mentioned, the course number was only 403. As a senior, I was already taking graduate-level courses in the 500s and 600s. I wished I had taken this course earlier because it would’ve made that independent study project I did with Dr. Gersting much easier. In that project, I had to implement an operating system. Unfortunately, at the time, I really didn’t have a very good understanding of how it all worked.

A few years later, when I started building my own personal computer, I really needed to understand all these things. For example, I had put together a completely customized set of hardware, and I had to write an extension to the computer’s BIOS to handle my specific hardware choices.

In those days, we didn’t have flash memory. Anything stored in computer memory would disappear when the power was turned off. We did have something called a ROM, which stands for Read-Only Memory. Programs stored in ROM are not lost when the power is turned off, but they cannot be changed. Their contents are burned in during the manufacturing process. However, there were devices called PROMs, which were Programmable Read-Only Memories. With special hardware, you could program your own ROMs. The catch was if you made a mistake and needed to update the program, you had to throw the chip away and program a new one.

Next came something called EPROM, which stands for Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory. If you need to erase the contents of the ROM, you can erase it and reuse it. There was a window on top of the chip. You would place the chip under a strong ultraviolet light overnight. That would erase the memory, and you could reuse it. I had one of those in my first personal computer and had to rewrite my BIOS extension several times.

Eventually, they invented something called EEPROM, which stands for Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory. They can be erased and rewritten electrically. It’s not such that you can read and write to the memory at will. You still have to erase it completely and rewrite new content. Such chips are used today to store the BIOS of your computer, and occasionally, when your computer updates its software, it will update your BIOS.

That particular class was one of the most useful classes I took because of the work I had to do on my first homemade PC.

Another class I took in my final semester was CS 661, ”Formal Compiler Methods.” As I explained in an earlier episode, a compiler is a program that translates a high-level language such as FORTRAN, Pascal, or C++ into machine language so that it can be run on the computer. The only thing a computer can do is run machine language. So, you need a compiler to translate other languages into machine language.

Most compilers take at least 2 passes through your program to translate it. In the first pass, your text is turned into tokens. For example, high-level languages have certain observed words such as “IF,” “THEN,” “ELSE,” and “WHILE,” just to name a few. It recognizes that these are reserved words and turns them into a number so they can deal with them more easily. You also get to make up names of locations where you will store values. These are called variable names. They can be anything you want, such as “MyData” or “Counter”. The compiler creates a symbol table of these names and assigns them memory locations.

The process of reading through your program and figuring out all of these things is called “parsing.” I was highly intrigued by different methods of parsing computer languages. In the 1990s, when I began working on the open-source CGI rendering program POV-Ray, I rewrote much of the language parsing section of the program and extended the programming language with new features. The other people on the team gave me the nickname “The Parse Meister.” So again, this course was one of the most useful courses I ever took.

The third class I took was “CS 590 Topics in Computer Science.” This was similar to the independent study project I had done with Gersting, except there were about five or six people in the class. It wasn’t just one-on-one. Anytime a professor wanted to teach a course that wasn’t in the regular curriculum, they just titled it “topics.”

The topic of this particular course was “Program Verification.” We explored formal methods of mathematically proving that a program did what you wanted it to. You would come up with different assertions that you would place throughout the program. These assertions were formal statements about things that you expected to be true of the data. You would then sort of manually run the program backward and see if the code really kept these assertions true.

I made good use of these methods in my work at the genetics lab. It wasn’t so much to verify that the code worked as designed. But we were having problems with bad data going into the database. We had data on punched cards from a previous record-keeping system. This data was put into a translation program that would put it in the new format for the database that we were creating. But occasionally, the data would get corrupted. It would not convert the data properly. So, I wrote a series of programs that would check the data for internal consistency.

Let me explain how the database worked. Each family had a family number, and each member of the family had a member number. In the members’ records, there was data explaining the relationship between that member and the other members of the family. So let’s say that the dad was member number one, the mom was member number two, and the kids were numbered three, four, five, etc.. There was a field called “spouse”. My program made sure that your spouse’s spouse was you. Sometimes, the data would get lost in translation, or maybe it wasn’t coded properly on the punchcards to begin with. The spousal numbers didn’t line up properly. My program would flag “Inconsistent spouse data.” Our data entry person, a nice lady named Paula, would go back and fix the original punched card data, run it through the translator again, and put the correct data in our new database.

They also had a system for keeping track of your siblings. Because you never know how many children a person is going to have, we only had one sibling pointer. The parents would point to the first child. The first sibling would point to the next one, and the next one, and the next one until you got to the last sibling, and that would point back to the first one. My program made sure that the loop closed properly and that each child had the same parents.

The whole concept behind this data verification program that I wrote came out of that topics class that I took in my final semester. It was probably my biggest contribution to the entire project.

We also faced the challenge of trying to get the data displayed in a graphical format. Geneticists have a way of drawing your family tree. If I recall correctly, men were represented by squares and women by circles. Lines connected family members in a particular standardized way. We had a computer plotter that would draw these graphs, and we had a printer that had some graphical capabilities.

I tried to come up with an algorithm that would more efficiently draw these family trees. I had a concept in my head about the way you would traverse the branches of the trees in a particular way that made it easier to create the plots. I wrote a proposal that I thought explained it, but Gersting couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I had not done a very good job of explaining the concept I had in my head. Unfortunately, I never did get around to implementing it. But I’m certain to this day I had a very useful way of creating such graphs.

That final semester was probably the second most stressful I ever had. It was a real challenge to work part-time in genetics and take graduate-level classes at the same time. Still, I managed to get two “A”s and a “B.”

I almost blew the final exam in one of the classes. I had missed a couple of classes under the stress of trying to get programs done. I decided I needed to go to class on the final day because I thought we were going to review before the final. I had the date wrong. This wasn’t a review day. It was the day of the final. If I decided to cut class that day, I would’ve missed the final and blown everything.

I also had to make special arrangements to take one of my finals on a different day. That’s because I was nearly in a car accident. I was riding in the wheelchair van going from my job to the 38th St. Campus when someone pulled out in front of us. The driver had to slam on the brakes very hard. Although my wheelchair was strapped down, it slid forward and bent my footrest as I slid into the back of the driver’s seat in front of me. It sprained my ankle quite severely. I called my professor and told him I had been injured in a minor accident and couldn’t make it. He agreed to let me take the final a couple of days late. I didn’t do very well on the final, so I told him, “As you can see, I didn’t cheat by taking the extra days to cram for the final because I didn’t do very well to begin with.” Ultimately, I still got a B out of the course based on my other work.

While we are talking about incidents while riding in the commercial wheelchair van, I should tell you about one other incident. The lift on my wheelchair van that my dad built was not fully automatic. Once you got up to the level where you could roll your wheelchair in, you had to manually fold up the lift. The wheelchair taxi company had fully automated lifts that would fold automatically.

The lift would unfold and lower to the ground. I would roll my wheelchair onto it backward with my back towards the van. The driver would then push a button, and the platform would raise until it was level with the floor of the van. I would then go back into the van, turn 90° facing forward, and there were straps on the floor that would attach to hold the chair in place.

There were two sets of controls for operating the lift. One was to be used while someone was on board. The other one was to be used when the lift was empty. That first set would automatically stop the lift when you got to the level position, allowing you to get off. But one day, the driver used the other controls. When it got to the top, he let go, but the button got stuck. Rather than stopping at the top, it proceeded to try to fold up with me in it. It was going to tip me over backward.

In the split second that all of this occurred, I began thinking about what it would be like to fall over backward. The driver was standing behind me, and I was going to fall on him, but I didn’t know how that was going to go. I had my head ducked forward to make it through the doorway. I was worried that when I landed, my head would snap back very hard. I figured it was better to put my head back ahead of time. Unfortunately, I did not think about the reason why I had my head forward to begin with. Without ducking, I don’t fit through the door. Just as I flung my head backward, the top of my head got wedged underneath the top edge of the doorframe.

As the lift continued to attempt to fold with me in it, it began jamming my head harder into the top of the doorframe. I could feel it compressing my spine. I was worried it was either going to crush my skull or break my back. I was saved by a rather disturbing outcome. The cable that was pulling the lift into its folded position broke on one side. The lift lurched slightly sideways as it was now being held solely by the right side cable. I don’t know if that triggered some other failsafe or if the driver finally got the button unstuck. But the lift stopped.

He then pushed the other button to unfold it until it was level again. I rolled safely into the van with nothing more than a bruised head and an aching neck.

Now, we had to figure out what to do next. How do we get me out of the van with a broken lift? We drove back to the wheelchair taxi’s garage headquarters. They had another vehicle available, but we had to figure out how to get me in it. We couldn’t figure out how to position the lift of one van to get me in the other one because we would have to unfold the broken lift.

When he unfolded the damaged lift, it was hanging a little bit crooked, but it looked reasonably solid. Having no other choice, I rolled out onto the broken lift, and he quickly lowered it to the ground. The remaining cable held. I got into the other van and made it home safely.

These days, I have a professionally made wheelchair lift on my van and it is fully automated. I make sure that when anyone operates it, they never use the button that can fold it up while I’m on the lift. They only use the other controls that automatically stop at the top.

I think the incident may have actually put a dent in my skull. If you look closely at my baldhead in the proper light, you can see bumps and valleys. Fortunately, there was no injury to my spine.

After nine semesters plus a summer class, I finally graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from Purdue University awarded at Indiana University – Purdue University at Indianapolis. Although I completed my coursework in December 1977, I had to wait until the June 1978 ceremony to actually attend commencement.

The commencement ceremony was held at Market Square Arena. Even though I had been to the arena many times over the years for sporting events and concerts and knew the place quite well, I took a wrong turn going from the parking garage to where I needed to go and ended up on a ramp that I had never taken before. It was much steeper than the ramps I usually took to navigate the venue. It felt like my chair was about to tip over backward, but fortunately, I kept it under control.

The commencement speaker was Mayor William Hudnut, III. He was one of my favorite mayors, even though he was a Republican. He was a really great guy.

At the time of my commencement, there was some sort of political controversy going on. I seem to recall it was a disagreement between Mayor Hudnut and the chief of police or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was. He made some reference to the disagreement in his commencement speech. It really disappointed me that he would take that opportunity to make political points during a commencement speech. Except for that one incident, overall, I really liked the guy.

A few years later, Mayor Hudnut awarded me a certificate naming me “Indianapolis Outstanding Handicapped Citizen” in recognition of the volunteer work I did as a member of the boards of directors of the Marion County Muscular Dystrophy Foundation and the Central Indiana Radio Reading service. See the YouTube version of this podcast for a photo of me receiving the honor. I liked him before that. He helped bring the NFL Colts here from Baltimore.

I didn’t need to go job hunting now that I had my sheepskin. The genetics department agreed to hire me full-time upon graduation. I don’t think Gersting had to do any persuasion to hire me in a permanent full-time position. I’d like to think that I had proven my worth to the department by then. But I’m sure Gersting was in on the decision to offer me the full-time position.

In upcoming episodes, we will discuss my remaining work at the department and the circumstances under which I eventually left for health reasons.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

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I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science and worked as a programmer at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 73 of Contemplating Life.

This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science and worked as a programmer at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

I started work at the genetics department in April 1977 during my eighth semester. We already covered the classes I took that semester. I would go to work early in the morning and ride with my dad. He worked at a sheet metal shop at 10th and West Street, just a couple of blocks from the genetics lab at Riley Hospital. I would work most of the day, and then the wheelchair van would transfer me to the 38th St. campus of IUPUI, where I would take evening classes. I don’t remember how many hours I worked for those first few weeks while I was still in school. It was only a month before finals when I started. After finals, I began working full-time at the genetics lab. Dad would take me to work each morning and pick me up again at the end of the day throughout the summer.

Over the summer, they hired three other student programmers. I don’t remember the names of the two guys, but there was a girl named Chrisel. We all got along very well. We had good times but managed to get a lot of good work done as well.

We had a timesheet that we were supposed to fill out each day and turn in at the end of the week. One of the guys came up with the idea of writing a computer program that would fill it out for us. We would crank the timesheet into a teletype machine and run the program, and it would fill out our hours. We were supposed to work an eight-hour shift with a lunch break in the middle. We didn’t actually clock in and out on the computer, although we told everyone we did. The program would start at 9 AM and randomly pick a time plus or minus 2 or 3 minutes. In the middle of the day, it would randomly pick a time for a ranch break. At the end of the day, it would pick a time that exactly matched eight hours. So it looked like we were arriving at random times plus or minus a couple of minutes and leaving exactly 8 hours later, but it was all bullshit. Don’t get me wrong… We really did work approximately eight hours. But the timesheets were a complete fabrication.

I don’t recall what we were paid hourly. One day, on payday, I noticed that the other students were being paid more than I was. Upon closer inspection, the hourly rate was the same, but the other student programmers did not have Social Security withdrawn from their checks. Apparently, at the time, there was a provision that if you were a student employee, you did not have to pay Social Security. But I was having it withdrawn.

The other programmers said, “Go talk to Randy. He will fix it for you.”

Randy was the department’s business manager. He was in his mid-30s and in a wheelchair from a spinal cord injury. He could move his arms a bit but had difficulty gripping things with his hands. He had some sort of mechanical device strapped to his wrist. He could flex his wrist, and it would open and close the grip of his fingers, allowing him to hold a pen or pencil. I thought it was a very clever device.

I never did go to see Randy about getting exempt from Social Security. I thought to myself, “Who knows, maybe someday I will need that extra time of eligibility.” It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Two years later, when I had to quit work because of my worsening disability, I needed to have paid a minimum of 8 quarters of Social Security payments in order to be eligible for Social Security disability. I had accumulated exactly 8 quarters. Had I taken the exemption for student employees and not paid into Social Security, I would’ve never been able to draw disability payments. I often wondered if Randy anticipated that possibility and did not automatically give me the exemption.

The girl, Chrisel, was an interesting character. She had an air of sophistication and haughtiness that bordered upon arrogance. It seemed that she was raised in a family of wealth and privilege and exuded that attitude. She seemed offended by Dr. Gersting’s gruff personality. She said, “I told my mother that Dr. Gersting’s language was crude and colorful. It’s populated with such words as ‘sucker.’ My mother replied, ‘I presume you are not referring to a piece of hard candy on a stick.’ I replied, ‘No, Mother. He says sentences like, ‘If this sucker doesn’t run by Friday, we are going to be screwed.’” That was an accurate description of Gersting. I loved him for it. She was disgusted by it.

One day, I got to meet her mother, a child psychologist who worked at Riley Hospital. One day, during our lunch break, she took me upstairs to meet Mom. It turns out that I was likely a former client of her mother. While sitting in the small waiting room outside her mom’s office, I had a flashback to a distant childhood memory of being in that very waiting room. There were pictures of clowns hanging on the wood-paneled walls. When I looked into the office, I also noticed the space.

I’m guessing I was about 4 or 5 years old, and my parents took me to be evaluated by a psychologist. They wanted to know if my disability was only physical or if there was something mentally wrong with me. In those days, I had an imaginary friend that concerned them. They took me to a woman for evaluation. She interviewed me and gave me puzzles to work. She had little triangular and square wooden tiles of various colors. She would show me a drawing, and I had to re-create the pattern using the colored tiles. I had no difficulty completing the task quickly. She reported to my parents that I was highly intelligent and that imaginary friends were completely normal… especially for smart kids like me with an overactive imagination and no other siblings to play with. Unless there was another female child psychologist occupying that same office 18 years ago, I’m certain it was Chrisel’s mother. Unfortunately, I didn’t put all this together until after I left her office, but I later told Chrisel that I might have been one of her mother’s clients when I was a child.

Chrisel and I went on a sort of a date one afternoon. We took a break and walked all the way over to University Hospital, about two blocks away. She said that the cafeteria there made great milkshakes. She invited me to come with her to get one. We had a nice time. I’m never one to turn down an opportunity to spend time with an attractive, smart woman, but overall, I don’t think she was quite my type. She was just a little bit too in love with her own sophistication.

She later went on a date with one of the other guys who was working with us. I think it was just dinner and a movie. I don’t think anything ever came of it.

Dr. Gersting taught a summer school class in the genetics department that summer. It was called “Discrete Computer Simulations CS 543.” He held it at 8:30 a.m., just as I was arriving. There were about five students. Besides me, all the rest were genetics grad students. We sat around a conference table. I was at the end of the table. Gersting was to my left. So I could look straight ahead and not make eye contact with him. That was a good thing because I often dozed off during the class–it was so early. One of the things that would occasionally keep me awake, if not exactly focused on the work, was a girl sitting on my right. She often wore loose-fitting flannel shirts with several unbuttoned buttons on the top. She never wore a bra. When she would turn a certain way, I could see down the front of her shirt and get a good look at her bare breast all the way to the nipple. I’m pretty sure she was lesbian, but that didn’t matter. Boobs are boobs. I was 20 years old. Given such an opportunity, I couldn’t keep from looking. Besides, it kept me awake.

Our final project was to write a computer simulation using a FORTRAN package of programs. I forget the name of the package. We had the option of doing a simulation that Gersting assigned or coming up with one of our own. The project was some sort of boring simulation of a widget factory. You had to run different scenarios to see if you could improve efficiency by expanding a production line with an extra workstation. I wanted to come up with a more interesting scenario. As a joke, I asked if I could simulate customers arriving at a brothel. Was it worth it for the Madam to hire an extra girl, given the average wait time of her customers? Gersting said that unless I could come up with real-world data to base it upon, just do the standard assignment. Not having access to the raw data, I did the assignment as assigned. I earned a B for the course.

When the summer ended, the other three student programmers left, and I never saw or heard from any of them again. I went back to part-time employment, working during the day and taking classes at night for my ninth and final semester.

When I was preparing my schedule for that final semester, my guidance counselor uttered the most dreaded words a college senior could hear: “You weren’t planning on graduating this semester, were you?”

Yes, I was planning on graduating.

You may remember many episodes ago when describing my first semester at IUPUI. I took a college algebra course that earned me 5 credit hours, and I was awarded an A. I felt that I needed the class to prepare for calculus, which I had never taken in high school. I was warned at the time that the School of Science would not count that course towards my mathematics requirements. They considered it a remedial class. I didn’t realize they were not going to count them as credit hours at all. No one had told me I would get no credit whatsoever. I just thought it would not count toward my math requirements, which I fulfilled. By the end of my ninth semester, I would have fulfilled all of the requirements for my degree except for the total number of credit hours. I was going to be five hours short.

I asked the counselor, “What am I to do? Go take some elective courses like art appreciation or basket weaving just to get five more hours. That’s ridiculous. I’m an undergrad getting As and Bs in graduate-level courses in computer science. Why do I have to take some crap course just to graduate?”

He suggested I write a letter to the Dean of the School of Science to see if I could get an exemption and get that 5-credit-hour remedial math class to count as an elective. So, I wrote to the dean and told him about the misunderstanding regarding the math class. I explained that I was warned that it would not count toward my math total, but I had already fulfilled my math requirements. I pointed out that I was making good grades in graduate-level courses in computer science. I explained that the Indiana Department of Vocational Rehabilitation normally only pays for 4 years of college, but I had cajoled them into paying for my ninth semester. I didn’t think I could get them to extend that another semester.

A few weeks later, I got a reply from the Dean. They would count that math class as an elective, and I could graduate in December 77 as planned.

Now for a brief epilogue: I need to start doing my research for these episodes before the editing phase. I tend to write the episode and then rush to get it recorded. Then, during editing, I decide to look up things so I can add links in the description and photos for the YouTube version. I need to do my research first.

Christine Ann Roeske was the woman who worked with me that summer in the genetics department. She went by the name Chrisel. I think she spelled it C.H.R.I.S.E.L. It must’ve been a childhood nickname. I always thought it was a shortened version of Crystal, but apparently, her real name was Christine. Her mother was Dr. Nancy Arnold Roeske. I didn’t remember her mother’s name, but I remembered their last name. I just chose not to mention it in the podcast because, let’s face it, I wasn’t very flattering to Chrisel.

That last name is spelled R.O.E.S.K.E. but is pronounced, “ress-key”– not “row-ski.”. I remember discussing with her that my uncle’s name was Roell, which is spelled R.O.E.L.L. The R.O.E. in both names is pronounced the same, with the “O” essentially silent. It’s ress-key and rell, not row-ski or row-ell.

I wanted to look up Dr. Roeske to see if she was working at Riley when I was a child. According to a blog post I found memorializing her, I don’t think she held that position. It says she completed her residency in 1964 and then took the position at Riley. I would have been nine years old in 1964. I’m pretty sure the thing I remembered was prior to that. Dr. Roeske was quite a woman and I encourage you to read the linked article about her. She died of cancer in 1986, a few days after her 58th birthday. I did not find an online version of her official obituary.

The article mentioned she had 2 children but didn’t give their names. It mentioned her husband, Dr. Roger William Roeski, so I went looking for his obituary in hopes of finding Chrisel’s actual name. I found a partial obituary that stated, “His first wife Nancy Arnold Roeske, daughter Christine Roeske, and sister Romelle Roeske preceded him in death.” He died in 2009 at age 82 from complications of Parkinson’s. It described Dr. Nancy as his first wife, so apparently, he remarried.

At first, I just saw the name Christine, and it didn’t sink in that she had preceded him. I googled her and found a record for her on a genealogy website that said, “She died on 11 October 1991, in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia, at the age of 34, and was buried in Minneapolis.” The article about her mother said that Dr. Roeske was born in Minneapolis. It didn’t list a cause of death for Christine, and I have no idea how she ended up in Australia. I would like to learn more about her life.

So, that’s the rest of the story. I need to start doing this research before I write.

In our next episode, I will talk about my final semester at IUPUI, my continuing work at the genetics lab, and my graduation with a BS degree in computer science.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the Topodcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available, and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback, please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science. I include the story of how my mentor, Dr. John Gersting, helped me get my first legitimate programming job.

This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science. We talk about the service fraternity that I joined in 1975.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 71 of Contemplating Life.

First, a bit of housekeeping…

In case you haven’t heard, Google Podcasts has gone away. Podcasts that were on Google Podcasts have migrated to YouTube because YouTube now has a podcast feature. Since I already have all of my episodes on YouTube in video format, I’ve not bothered to migrate the audio versions to YouTube. So, anyone who is using Google Podcasts, just subscribe to my YouTube channel, and you can catch up with everything there. In the YouTube versions you can listen to them without having to watch the video itself.

The other thing that’s going on is if you subscribe to Patreon for me, or anyone else for that matter, through an iOS app on your iPhone or iPad, Apple is going to charge a 30% tax. So, if you do subscribe to Patreon please do not do so on iOS through your iPhone or iPad. Instead, do it through the website or an android phone or any other method you can subscribe.

One last item… If you are watching me on YouTube, you may notice I have a strap across my forehead. I’ve been having more trouble keeping my hand up straight and keeping it balanced in the headrest, so I’ve been wearing this head strap. Normally I only use it while riding in the van, but I have been using it around the house more and more, and I feel much more comfortable with it.

I’ve talked to my wheelchair people, and they are getting me a new headrest. I’m hopeful it will hold my head in a more comfortable position. It has a head strap that is easier to use than this one.

So, now we will go on with my regularly scheduled episode.

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

Chronologically we were about to tell the events of my eighth of nine semesters but there was a story from earlier in my college days that I neglected to tell. It’s going to be a short episode but I need to tie up a loose end.

Sometime in 1975, probably in the spring semester, I pledged to a fraternity at IUPUI. It wasn’t your ordinary social fraternity, complete with a frat house and toga parties. It was more of a service organization. I pledged to the Tau Omicron Chapter of Alpha Phi Omega. The organization was based on the principles of the Boy Scouts of America. Despite that origin, it was a coed fraternity. Technically the female members were a separate organization known as “Little Sisters,” but in our chapter, we made no such distinctions. The girls were members just like the guys.

My friend Kathy Logan who I’ve spoken about was a member. So was Frank Williams who I’ve mentioned a number of times. Neither Rich nor Mike were involved. I knew Frank before he pledged for the organization. Kathy says she didn’t meet me until she pledged but I thought I knew her independently of the frat. I guess not. She is the only lasting friend that came out of the organization and I think I would have met her even if I wasn’t involved.

The pledge process was nothing spectacular. They didn’t engage in any significant hazing. I was assigned a member to be my sponsor. It was a girl whose name I forget. The next year I sponsored a girl named Dorie Radke. Neither of those friendships was significant. I don’t know where they are at today.

I mentioned that we did not have a frat house. All we had was a tiny room off the back of the vending machine room in the library building on 38th St.

They engaged in a number of service projects with the one I spent most time working on was the used book exchange. Normally if you sell your used textbooks to the bookstore, you would be lucky to get a third of the cover price, and they would sell it to some other student with a significant markup.

For the first couple of weeks of each semester, we would set up tables underneath the stairway of the Highway Cafeteria at the downtown campus. People would bring us their used books and put whatever price they wanted on them. Others would come by and purchase the books, and we would give the full amount of money to the original owner. Occasionally out of gratitude, they would give us the tip, but we never took any money off the top. Only if you failed to collect your money by the end of the sale did we keep the money ourselves. If there were leftover books, we would box them up and donate them somewhere. I think it was generally to a prison library.

I was heavily involved in the event for several semesters scheduling our members to man the tables. I was always there every free minute that I was at the downtown campus and not in class. It was reasonably rewarding but nothing spectacular.

Somewhere along the way, we had an election of officers, and I ran for president. My pitch was I wasn’t going to be any good going out on service projects such as painting a house for an elderly person or clearing weeds out of a vacant lot to improve a neighborhood. Other than the book exchange, I don’t recall what other kinds of projects we engaged in. But I still felt my skills as an organizer administrator would be my best contribution to the group. I didn’t have any particular agenda about how to make the group better. I wasn’t anxious to be in control. I didn’t want to make a bunch of changes. It just seemed like a logical choice.

There is an old joke (I think it was from Rodney Dangerfield) about the guy who was so disrespected that a measure he voted against was unanimously approved. I was in nearly the same situation. I ran for president unopposed, and I lost.

Well, I was unopposed until five minutes before the election. Some of the members apparently huddled together with an attitude of, “We can’t let this guy run the show.” They talked a guy named Andy into running at the last minute. I lost. One of the members of the previous administration leaked to me that it was “an extremely close vote.” He almost implied that there was something fishy about the vote. They never did release the totals.

There was a regional convention of the fraternity held in Indianapolis in 1975 at a downtown hotel. I attended, and it was kind of fun meeting people from other chapters around the Midwest.

The big controversy at that meeting was that like my chapter, most of the other chapters did not have a house but were given use of space in university buildings. If those universities received federal dollars, and most of them do, then they were subject to federal antidiscrimination rules. There were no racial issues that I was aware of, but unlike my chapter, many of the chapters did not allow women. They were being given a choice either to accept women as full voting members indistinguishable from the men or lose the support of their host university. Even if you had a women’s auxiliary or “Little Sisters” chapter, that wasn’t good enough. Naturally, the excuse of “separate but equal” doesn’t hold up in federal court.

It didn’t affect us because, like I said, we didn’t make any distinction. The women were full members. But it was a major topic of discussion at the convention.

Even though it was primarily a service organization, we had some pretty good parties. There was always a party after the initiation ceremonies for new members, and I went to at least one New Year’s Eve party in which my dad and a bunch of the guys had to carry me up a flight of stairs to a rented community room in an apartment complex. Going up the stairs early in the evening wasn’t so scary. Going back down again at 1 AM when my dad was tired, and many of the guys had been drinking was another thing. There were a couple of other disabled students who pledged the frat one year, both women. I was friendly with them but never got close. They seemed more scared of being carried up and down stairs than I was. I had known these guys for a while, so I trusted them.

Someone decided we should put on a comedy sketch at one of the parties. I wrote some jokes, and so did some of the other guys. We did a version of the classic Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First? routine. It was well received. They asked us to do it again for the next pledge party and it didn’t go as well. A couple of the more Boy Scout-like members thought the comedy was too raunchy. I tried to explain to him we didn’t do anything you couldn’t see on Saturday Night Live any week. In fact, I stole the material from SNL. I also did a Johnny Carson-like “Carnak The Magnificent” routine. He replied, “Well, you can always change the channel if you don’t like something on TV.” I didn’t care. It wasn’t that dirty. Like I said, it was all TV-capable. I told the next year I wouldn’t do it and I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing it.

For me the funniest part was that when the prudish member called us aside to complain about the content he suggested “it was too blue”. One of the younger members who participated had never known what “blue comedy” meant. He thought being “blue” meant it was sad. He didn’t understand the complaint at all and I thought it was hilarious that he thought that blue comedy meant sad jokes.

The only other interesting thing that came out of the experience was at a meeting one evening, an older member of the frat called me aside. He was a big burly guy with a long, hard-to-pronounce Greek name. I think he was actually an alumnus and the older brother of one of our members. He handed me a business card with the words “Order of the Sons of Pericles” on it and said, “If anyone ever gives you any trouble or tries to mess with you or if you ever need anything, call us.”

I thanked him and put the card in my wallet.

I came away wondering, “Am I a made man now?”

I never saw the guy again. I still carry the card in my wallet. I never tried to use it. Years later, I did a Google search. It turns out they are a legitimate service organization. They are a junior auxiliary of a larger organization called the American Hellenistic Educational Progressive Association, which was formed in 1922 as a civil rights organization to counteract the Ku Klux Klan. See the linked Wikipedia article for details. Given that I never heard of them at the time, it sure was a creepy experience. This strange guy comes up to me and says, “If you need anything… we’ll take care of it.” It turns out they are a bunch of good guys.

I remember trying to encourage some of my other classmates. I don’t recall who, to pledge the frat. His reply was, “I want to choose who my friends are. I don’t want to have to be friends with a bunch of guys just because they joined the same organization I joined. What if they are all a bunch of assholes? I’m still expected to treat them like brothers? Count me out.” Maybe he was right. Except for Kathy, which I’m confident I would’ve met anyway, my experience in Alpha Phi Omega left no lasting impact on me, either positive or negative.

Many episodes ago when I was speculating about what I might do if I could live my life over again, the only major decision I would change would be to not waste my time pledging the frat. While I had some good times being part of the organization, overall, I never felt like I got as much out of it as I put into it. So, I could live without the experience.

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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.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.