This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 64 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting. I apologize in advance that this is going to be a long episode.

We now continue with my sixth semester at IUPUI. My transcript says I took MATH 361 “Advanced Calculus and Differential Equations”. By now the math was getting pretty hairy and I never really got a feel for calculus and differential equations. I snuck by with a “D”.

I also took Physics 342 “Modern Physics” which involved Einstein’s special and general relativity as well as quantum mechanics. While I enjoyed the lab portion of the class, I never could wrap my head around quantum mechanics. The more I learned about relativity, the less impressed I became with Einstein. He had such a pop-culture image of being this amazing genius but I learned that as is the case in all scientific pursuits, much of what he did was simply an extension of the work of people before him.

We learned about the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which proved that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. As a consequence of that experiment, Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz derived the famous Lorenz Transformations which describe how time dilates and length changes as you approach the speed of light. I had always thought these derivations came from Einstein but they actually came from Lorentz as a result of Michelson and Morley.

The problem was, nobody understood the significance of those works. It took Einstein who had the courage to throw out a bunch of preconceived ideas of how physics worked to really understand the significance of these previous discoveries. Then that led him to develop both special and general relativity. So while I give him props for following the data where it led him despite the fact it blew up centuries of science before that, Einstein really didn’t do that much in my opinion.

Furthermore, as a third-year college physics student, I was expected to fully understand relativity. None of us in that class, especially me, could be described as a physics genius. Yet I came away with a pretty good understanding of relativity. Relativity is bizarre and counterintuitive but once someone figured it out, it does not take a genius to understand it. Just a well-educated college physics student.

I didn’t do so well when it came to quantum mechanics. The idea that something could be simultaneously a particle and a wave is something that physicists still can’t explain to this day. The problem I had was if it was a wave, what was the medium? Scientists used to believe there was something called ether. Electromagnetic waves were thought to be vibrations in this invisible medium. But Michelson and Morley proved that there is no ether.

I wanted to bring back the concept of ether. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of vibrating energy without the medium. Not only was I way off base, but in some ways, I was ahead of my time. I think I was on the verge of inventing string theory. String theory is the idea that all matter consists of vibrating strings of energy. String theorists don’t say what the strings are made of. So the problem persists. Whether it’s vibrating strings or electromagnetic waves, what exactly is the medium? What is it that is vibrating? No one can tell me. Although the origins of string theory date back to 1943, it wasn’t until around 1984 that physicists started getting excited when they began to believe that string theory could accurately model all of the elementary particles of the standard model of physics as well as the interaction between them.

Proponents of string theory have yet to produce anything useful. It seems to be the general consensus that there is no experiment you can do to prove string theory so although it had some interesting potential, it hasn’t fulfilled its promise. People who still work on the theory are often ridiculed by mainstream physicists.

Had I been better at math and physics, I might’ve gotten into the field of string theory and spent decades producing nothing useful. Fortunately for me, I was getting Ds in calculus and differential equations and I got so confused in this physics class that I ended up withdrawing from it. It’s the only class that I did not complete in college.

Somewhere along the way, the School of Science changed its basic requirements for a degree. They lowered some of the liberal arts requirements which I had already met. I don’t remember the details, but it was to my advantage to switch to the new curriculum. I think it saved me from a couple of liberal arts classes but I had to take a class in public speaking. I enjoyed it and earned a B. I could tell you more about that class but it wasn’t that interesting for our storytelling purposes.

We want to resume talking about my computer classes under my mentor Dr. John Gersting.

CS 461 “Programming 3” was the class I talked about last week in which Gersting told us we had to teach ourselves the course. The title of the book that he wrote was “Algorithmic Languages” and it was a brief survey of I believe 5 or 6 computer languages. There were a few introductory chapters, and then a chapter on each language. At the end of each chapter, there was a programming assignment, and as I mentioned before quizzes and tests that you had to pass 100% before you could go on.

The only deadline was that we had to complete the course by the end of the semester. He posted a chart outside his office that showed where everyone in the class was. A semester lasted 15 weeks. There was one guy who finished the entire course in about three weeks. We all considered him a show-off or a brown nose. All of the rest of us including me and my friend Rich went through the course at a leisurely rate. We would look at the chart and notice that we were all in approximately the same position. It didn’t occur to us until almost too late that we were not going to finish in time. Comparing ourselves to one another was a really bad idea because we were all doing terribly. More on that in a minute.

The book that Gersting wrote was a phenomenal reference book. We began referring to it as “The Bible” because it had all the answers. Then one day I said, “Actually, it’s not the entire Bible. It’s just ‘The Gospel According to John.’” I wrote that across the top of my book but I don’t know if Dr. John Gersting ever saw it.

There was one programming assignment where I got a D from Gersting. I don’t recall if it was in Programming 2 or Programming 3. I tried to raise a negative number to an exponent that was a floating-point number. For example, if you take 2 to the power of 2 that is just 2 squared which equals 4. Similarly, you can take -2 to the power of 2 and that also equals 4. No problem. Now suppose you take 9 to the power of 0.5. That’s just the square root so the answer is 3. But what if you try to take -9 to the power of 0.5 you can’t do that. Mathematically it’s undefined.

The compiler or the runtime system should’ve created an error but it didn’t. It gave an answer of -3. So essentially it took the square root of +9 and then just tacked on the minus sign.

I complained when he gave me a D. I said, “The compiler and the runtime system let me do it.” His response was, “If the guy who wrote the compiler was in my class I would have flunked him. But instead, you get a D. Are you still going to pass the class with one low grade on one project?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ever going to raise a negative number to a floating-point exponent again?”

“No.”

“Case closed. The D stands.”

The bottom line is, he was very tough but he was fair. I came up with an adage, “The only thing more difficult than a guy who thought he wrote the book on the subject was the guy who did write the book on the subject.”

Rich later amended that theory. He topped it when he went into an advanced math class and on the first day the teacher had them open up the textbook and read the acknowledgments page. The author thanked someone for proofreading the book and catching many errors. The proofreader was Rich’s math professor. So Rich said, “Worse than a guy who thinks he wrote the book on the subject and worse than the guy who did write the book on the subject is the guy who was so smart he could catch the mistakes in the guy who wrote the book on the subject.” He had me there.

One of the most significant events in my relationship with Dr. Gersting occurred one day when I went to his office to give him a progress report on my independent study project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to report. I was lagging way behind on the project. Anyway, when I offered to fill him in on my progress, such as it was, he said he was on his way to the teachers’ lounge to eat dinner and invited me to sit with him and talk. It’s not like I was being let into some supersecret off-limits area. But it wasn’t somewhere that students normally went. I gave my report, such as it was, and then he started sort of rambling about the students in our class. I don’t remember the name of the student he was talking about. We will call him Joe.

“Did you notice Joe hasn’t been in class lately?” He noted.

“Yeah, now that you mention it. Is he sick?”

“No, he’s dropping out. His wife is expecting their first child. He was offered a position writing COBOL for an insurance company so he felt like he had to take it.” That type of job was considered sort of the bottom of the barrel for computer programmers–especially computer science majors. You could sense how disappointed he was. He stared into space for a moment and then continued. “My worry is he will never come back to complete his education. You’re fortunate that your education is being paid for because of your disability and you don’t have responsibilities distracting you from your education.”

I suddenly saw a completely different side of the man. He was so harsh on us because he wanted the best for us. I suddenly realized how deeply he cared for his students. He cared about their life and their career. And most of all he cared about me. He was thinking about my future.

I was struggling to complete the independent study project to create the operating system for our computer simulator. Furthermore, my Programming 3 class was not going well either. Part of the purpose of the course was to teach us self-discipline. In the real world, you only have one deadline. Finish the entire project on time. We kept looking at the chart thinking we were doing as well as everyone else but when it came down to the wire we were all in trouble.

By the way, Gersting once said, “I don’t think God created the world in six days. I think he thought about it for five days and then pulled an all-nighter.” I think being a procrastinator comes with the mentality of a programmer. We pulled lots of all-nighters to finish on time. That’s why I was so sympathetic to the gal who hired me to help her with her last-minute programming assignments that I talked about a couple of episodes ago.

The computer room was always packed in the final days of the semester and it was hard to find a free teletype machine to log in. I remember sitting there with Rich just a couple of hours before the final deadline. I barely got mine finished. Rich had his program working but he needed to print out a final copy. The teletype he was working on broke down. It would print but at the end of each line, it would not advance the paper. It just kept printing on top of the same text over and over again. You had to guess when it was going to do a carriage return and then crank the knob by hand. The result was a printout that went all over the page but at least you could read it. With just minutes to spare we rushed from the computer room in the A-Building to Gersting’s office in the K-Building. There was a line of students trying to turn things in at the last minute. I remember Gersting looking at Rich’s output and saying, “What the hell happened here?” Rich explained about the broken teletype. I don’t recall what grade he got but I think he did okay. I ended up with a “B”.

This semester was undoubtedly the most difficult semester that I had. In addition to this programming class, I had that independent study project with Dr. Gersting. I was supposed to write the operating system for the computer simulator we had worked on the previous year. I barely got the job done and wrote a ridiculously brief report. He easily could have failed me in class or given me an incomplete but he didn’t.

The pressure of having to drop a physics class, getting a poor grade in calculus, rushing to complete Programming 3, and doing a piss-poor job in my independent study class nearly led me to a nervous breakdown.

When I eventually graduated and got a full-time job, people asked me if it was going to be hard to work full-time. I said, “Hell no. 40 hours per week will be a piece of cake compared to what I’ve been through. College is a 24/7 endeavor. There’s always another chapter you could reread. There’s always another program you could’ve written better. There’s always another test you should cram for. Even if you think you’ve gotten everything done, you haven’t. The pressure is constant. Being able to walk away from a job at 5 PM each day and leave it behind me until the next a and to have my weekends completely free is going to be magnificent compared to what I’ve been through.”

The following semester, I had a class with Dr. John Gersting’s wife Dr. Judith Gersting. It was called “Discrete Computer Structures CS 482.” It wouldn’t be the first day in a class with a Dr. Gersting without me getting shrouded like Mr. Hart did by Prof. Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase.”

Before the first class began, one of my classmates and I were talking. “Hey Chris, how did that independent study project go with Dr. G.?”

“It was a disaster. I barely got any reasonable amount of work done. I ended up throwing together a report at the last minute and turning it in. He GAVE me a C for the course.” I put a strong emphasis on the word “gave”.

Then I heard a voice calmly declare, “It was a gift you know.”

I turned around to notice that Dr. Judith Gersting was standing at the front of the classroom. The comment came from her.

“What?” I said.

“It was a gift that he gave you a C.”

“I know that,” I muttered. “It was a gift.”

I did know it was a gift. He could’ve easily flunked me.

Inside I was freaking out. I had a new version for the worst teacher scenario. It’s not so bad when the teacher writes the book on the subject. It’s not even so bad when your teacher is so smart they can correct the mistakes of the guy who wrote the book on the subject. Worse than all of that is when you have teachers who are married to one another and you are the subject of conversation between them. My reputation was preceeding me and it wasn’t a good one.

In retrospect, it was arguably a positive thing. Mr. Dr. G. had my best interests at heart. He knew I’d done poorly but he wasn’t going to crash my GPA or have me come up short and not graduate on time. I probably deserved a D rather than an F because I did complete the work. But it was seriously substandard. The fact that he was willing to give me a break knowing that I would do better in the future was positive. Furthermore, the fact that he had communicated that to Mrs. Dr. G. was arguably also a positive. But it was hard to see that at the time. At that moment, I just felt like I had been shrouded by Mrs. Kingsfield.

The course was a highly advanced computing theory class in which we discussed things like Turing machines which were a hypothetical computer invented by computing pioneer Alan Turing. His life was chronicled in the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.” Turing was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. He was a mathematician who invented the machine that cracked the German enigma code and saved thousands of lives in World War II. Yet he was stripped of all of his honors for being a homosexual. He ended up killing himself.

I drew a cartoonish image of a Turing machine on the front of my notebook that caught the eye of Mrs. Dr. Gersting. She thought it was cute.

I will never forget the most challenging yet rewarding homework assignment that I had in my 4 and-one-half years of college. It simply said…

“Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”

Unless you had some advanced math and/or computability courses you are probably completely clueless about what that sentence means. At the time, so was I. And so were several of my classmates. Some of them were graduate students taking the class. For me, the course was CS 482 but for graduate students, it was called CS 582. The undergrads and grads took the course together.

Without going into a bunch of mathematics that is unimportant, let me give this summary. There is this mathematical concept called a “group”. It’s a way to take several objects as operators, perform some function upon them, and come out with an answer that is a member of that group. Rather than try to explain it here, I found a YouTube video that solves this exact question in almost precisely the way that I and my fellow students figured it out. It took us hours to do so but there was a phenomenal sense of satisfaction that we a taken such an obscure problem and managed to figure it out.

Given that I found so many web pages and YouTube videos attempting to answer the same question, it must still be a standard question for such courses today.

The question said, “Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”

It didn’t say prove it. Because you don’t prove it. It said “Show it” and we did. It’s not like proving a theorem. It’s something that simply is.

Some things are just true. You can demonstrate that they are true. Some things are false. You can demonstrate that. This led me to create what I called “Young’s Theorem.” The theorem states, “If it is, it is. If it isn’t, it isn’t. The proof is… Is it? Then it is. Is it not? Then it is not.”

It’s silly. I understand that. But it was my expression of my satisfaction that I took a wildly hypothetical, marginally useful, mathematical question and came up with an answer when my initial assessment was I had no idea what the fuck they were asking. And that led me to the understanding that for the most part, you can figure things out. True things are true. False things are false.

Well… Naturally, it’s more complicated than that. Later in the course, we learned that there is an entire class of problems that cannot be solved. It’s called computability theory. Some things simply cannot be solved by a computer. The primary example is you can’t write a computer program that will analyze another computer program to tell you definitively will that program will complete its task and stop. It’s sort of the mathematical equivalent of the question, “If God is all-powerful, can He create an object so massive that He can’t lift it?” If he can create such an object. Then He is not all-powerful because He can’t lift it. If He cannot create such an object, then He is not all-powerful.”

Years later this paradox led me to create a joke.

There are two kinds of people in the world and I can prove it.

There is one group of people that believes that there are two kinds of people in the world. There is another group of people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people in the world. So there. I just proved there are two kinds of people.

But because I proved it, there should no longer be people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people because I’ve given definitive proof that there definitively are two kinds of people. But once I’ve convinced everyone that there are two kinds of people. There are no longer two kinds of people. There are only people who do believe that there are two kinds of people because they accepted my proof.

But now, that is no longer true because everyone now believes that there are two kinds of people which means there’s only one kind of person– namely those that believe. But they are wrong.

And so on with infinite circular reasoning.

So who knows… In an alternate universe. I might have been a pioneer of string theory and solved the ultimate theory of everything. But I didn’t have sufficient math background to prove it and apparently, no one else does either or if they did, string theory would be widely accepted as the theory that explains all of physics.

Or I might have become famous for describing what is the worst kind of teacher to have when you are an insecure college student. (I vote that having 2 teachers married to each other is still the worst.)

Or people could have bought into my ridiculous Young’s Theorem that true is true and false is false no matter how trivial that observation is. That would be particularly useful these days when our political discourse includes ridiculous phrases such as “alternate facts”.

That’s the kind of insanity that arises when you are overwhelmed as a college student. Fortunately, I had the Gerstings guiding me through that insanity and somehow I came out on the other end okay.

We are going to go off-topic next week to celebrate my history as a fan of motorsports because we are coming up on the month of May in Indianapolis which is the time of the Indy 500. After that, we are going to return to my college stories and eventually, the Gerstings will play a big role in those stories as well. I don’t want to skip ahead and tell those stories now. I will tell them in chronological order with the other events of my life at that time.

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

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.

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.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days and discuss the great friendships I had some of which continue to this day.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 61 of Contemplating Life.

This week I want to talk about some of the great friendships I had in my college days. As I mentioned last episode, this is a difficult one to write because it’s about people who are still an active part of my life. While I like these stories to be “tell all”, especially when it gives me a chance to confess some of my stupid behavior, some stories are better left private.

As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, we didn’t have a regular cafeteria in the K-Building at the 38th St. campus of IUPUI. It was just a big lunch room with lots of tables and chairs. Adjacent to it was a vending machine room where you could get stale ham and cheese sandwiches, horrible pizza, snack food, and soft drinks. There was a microwave oven you could use to heat up whatever you purchased.

The room also became a hangout for a group of friends to socialize. Early in the morning someone would break out a deck of cards and start a euchre game. Sometimes the game would last until dinnertime. People would come and go and take your place if you had to go study or go to class.

There was a crazy guy named Mark who was a tall blonde-haired guy who talked way too loud and often said very embarrassing and misogynistic things that occasionally made you embarrassed to be at the same table with him. But except for his unfortunate lack of a filter, he was a really great guy and the life of the party.

There was another guy named Kevin who was fortunately much more restrained than Mark but still a fun guy. Very smart. I don’t recall what his major was.

There was a guy named Gilley who would come to school with a cup of coffee from White Castle that he had spiked with some sort of alcohol. Even at 10 AM, you could smell alcohol on his breath. Extremely intelligent and very fun to be around. A talented card player. My guess is he probably dropped out at some point because of his drinking but I don’t know that for a fact.

There were a few women in the group. Sadly I don’t remember most of their names. There was a friendly gal named Cindy who had short red hair and rode a motorcycle. We went out to the movies and to dinner a couple of times but it never got serious.

I’ve lost touch with all of these people. I’ve tried doing Google searches and Facebook searches but most of their names are just too common. You get lots of people with the same name.

We’ve already talked at length about my late friend Mike Gregory who was part of this motley crew.

There was a computer technology major named Frank Williams who was a good buddy. Computer technology is slightly different than computer science which was my major. The details aren’t important right now. Frank is an excellent keyboard player. He had his own band in college or shortly thereafter. I went with my friends Rich and Kathy to hear him play at some bar on the east side when time. I think Frank sees himself as a Billy Joel-type person. He played lots of Billy Joel’s songs and also could play a few Keith Emerson pieces from the band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Keith Emerson is my favorite rock ‘n’ roll keyboard player.

Frank liked to call me Christopher even though I repeatedly told him that my actual name is just Chris. To retaliate, I decided to start calling him Frankfurter. I told him, “If you can put a ‘topher’ on the end of my name I can put a ‘furter’ on the end of your name.” The nickname was especially appropriate for him because frequently he would bring a bag lunch of hot dogs. He would take two hot dogs, slice them lengthwise, and put them between two slices of white bread. He would then microwave the sandwich and load it up with copious amounts of ketchup and mustard. When he would bite into the sandwich, the ketchup and mustard would drip all over the place. It was a sight to behold.

After graduation, I kept in touch with him briefly. We had a little reunion at my house a few years after college one day when Mike Gregory was back in town for a visit. But then I lost touch with him for many years. Finally, a few years ago, we reconnected on Facebook. With a common name like Frank Williams, I didn’t think I’d ever find him but I finally did

He is still playing in a band. Last summer, they were playing at a church festival on the south side and I went to hear him. It was the first I’d seen him in probably 30 years. He is not the lead in the band. He just plays keyboards but he does sing lead vocals on some songs. The guitar player is the lead.

Frank sounded fine. The lead singer sounded okay. But for some reason, I don’t think their voices mix very well. I think I liked his band better but this one isn’t half bad. Anyway, it was still great to hear him and to talk to him for a few minutes after the performance. It’s great to be in touch with him via Facebook after all these years.

Frank had a girlfriend named Kay who also attended IUPUI. They had been dating since high school. Somewhere along the way in college, they broke up even though everyone thought they would be together forever. I was also able to connect to Kay on Facebook recently.

As I alluded to last episode, the most important and long-lasting friendship from my college days is with my dear friend Rich Logan. I met Rich in the CS 300 Assembly Language Programming class I talked about last week. We hit it off as friends immediately and it has lasted almost 50 years.

By the way, speaking of that assembly language class, I finally found my little green card. You can see an image of it in the YouTube version.

There was a rec room across the hall from the lunch room. It had about a half-dozen pinball machines, a foosball table, and several pool tables along with other tables for playing chess or other board games. Rich and I played pinball but I could only work one of the buttons so I would get on the left side of the machine and work the left flipper. Rich would fire the pinball on the right side and work the right flipper. I was never any good at it but we had lots of fun.

In the summer of 1976, there was a sci-fi movie named “Logan’s Run”. Because Rich’s last name is Logan, a bunch of us decided we needed to go see the movie together with him. Rich recalls that he was the only one of the group who had not yet seen the movie but I don’t think I had seen it either. As best as either of us can recall, it must have been in late August or early September 1976.

The problem was, how to get me to the movie. I called my mom using a payphone (no cell phones in those days) and told her a bunch of us wanted to go to a movie one afternoon. I asked her if Rich could come by, pick up my van, bring it back to IUPUI, and drive me to the movie. He would then return the van to my house then get back in his car and leave. My mom quickly agreed.

Rich loves telling the story about the first time he ever met my mom. He couldn’t believe that he could walk up there being a total stranger and say, “I’m here to get your van,” and she just handed him the keys and let him drive it away. He said, “I thought what kind of crazy lady is this that would trust me with her car and trust me to drive her disabled son to the movies when she had never met me before?”

I explained to Rich, “It probably wasn’t easy for her. She was probably really worried. But she trusted me and I trusted you and that was good enough. It’s also a testament to how far my mom would go to attempt to give me a life that was as normal as possible. It’s normal for a guy to want to go see a movie with his college friends. If that’s what it took to make that possible, she was going to do it.”

The movie was about a guy named Logan in a future where people were not allowed to live past the age of 30. At birth, they had a small glowing crystal embedded in the palm of their hand. As they aged, it would change colors. When you turned 30, your crystal began blinking red. You then had to participate in some ritual ceremony called “Carousel” in which people would be exploded in a grand spectacle. But they were told that a small percentage would be “renewed”. People in the audience would shout “Renew, Renew” as the victims exploded. But it seemed like no one ever knew anyone who actually was renewed. People who realized that the “Carousel” was actually a death sentence, would refuse to participate in the ceremony. They became so-called “runners”. Logan was a type of police officer known as a “Sandman”. It was his job to chase down runners and terminate them.

Logan was sent on an undercover mission. They turned his crystal blinking red to make him a runner even though he was still only in his mid-20s. He was supposed to track down an underground movement that would lead runners to a legendary place called “Sanctuary”. When Logan inquired, “When my mission is over, do I get my years back?” The computer that gave him the assignment refused to answer. So now Logan really was a runner.

After watching the movie, our buddy Mark decided to start calling Rich by the nickname “Runner” and he went by that nickname for quite a time. I don’t think I used it very much if at all except perhaps when we were all in the group.

There was a woman and a group named Kathy Willaert. At first, it was hard to get to know her. Rich described her as “the quiet, shy girl who was always reading a book.” Many in the group never bothered to try to get to know her. Fortunately one day Kathy and I set down together and had a very long heart-to-heart talk where I did get to know her well. Once you got to know her, she was an amazing person. But few people bothered to take the time to really listen to her and to get to know her. They just sort of wrote her off which was quite unfair.

Had I written her off as unapproachable, I would have lost out on an amazing friendship.

As I previously explained, my approach towards women was that anyone who showed any kindness was immediately categorized as a potential girlfriend. And once I got to know Kathy, she could have fallen into that category very easily except for one thing. Even though I think she was about 19 years old at the time, she did not have a driver’s license. I’m sad to say, that was a dealbreaker for me. So although I was quite fond of her, I never really considered her a potential girlfriend.

One of the people who took the time to get to know Kathy and to truly appreciate her was Rich. I’m pretty sure that Kathy went with all of us to see “Logan’s Run” and somehow I had speculated years later that that was the beginning of their relationship – their first sort of unofficial first date. But according to them, their first real date was to see a rerelease of Disney’s “Fantasia.” According to Wikipedia, that rerelease was in April 1977 but I have no idea when they actually saw it.

When the gang learned that the two were dating, there was lots of gossiping about it. At one point, the gang witnessed Rich and Kathy disagreeing about something. After they left the room, someone said (well I’m embarrassed to say it might’ve been me that said it), they speculated that it wouldn’t last two weeks. Anyway, whoever said it first, me or somebody else, everyone agreed. Well, when that statement got back to them, they didn’t appreciate it. Over 45 years later they are still together and they still argue. When I reminded Rich of that recently, he said, “Yes we just stayed married to spite everyone. We are still waiting on our pool winnings.” Although we never did wager any money, if we had, Rich and Kathy would’ve taken the lot.

There was a bit of tension between the three of us. I grew jealous of the time they spent together. I think they thought I was jealous because Rich had stolen Kathy away from me or we were competing for her attention. But that wasn’t the case. As I explained before, Kathy’s inability to drive made her ineligible even though I really liked her. What really happened was Kathy got between me and my best buddy. I was jealous that she was stealing Rich away from me – not that Rich was keeping Kathy from me. But we worked it all out and we have been friends for decades now. There have been good times and bad times and we have shared them all together.

Sometime in March or April 1979, my disability got worse. I developed congestive heart failure and landed in the hospital for two weeks. Rich and Kathy visited me frequently and continue to visit me nearly every time I’m in the hospital. Rich also came to visit as I was recovering at home.

I remember one day we tried to hook up my Atari 2600 game system to my bedroom TV so I could play video games with him while I was in bed. We finally got it all hooked up and working and then I realized I couldn’t work the controller while in bed. My hands were too weak. So he played for a while and I watched. About 30 minutes later I realized I had fallen asleep. When I woke up, he was just quietly sitting by my bedside keeping me company.

When I was finally able to get out of bed briefly, he came by for a visit and we sat in my family room. He said he had a favor to ask. He wanted me to be the Best Man at his wedding to Kathy. I was honored of course. I explained I wasn’t sure I would be well enough in time for the wedding. At the time I could only be out of bed a couple of hours a day. He told me he had a plan B. Frank would be his backup best man.

My mom took me to the rehearsal the day before the wedding. It was in a Protestant church used by Rich’s family. Kathy, her sister who was maid of honor, and I were all nonpracticing Catholics in a Protestant wedding. Rich and Kathy’s parents, my mom, and perhaps some other family members were there for the rehearsal. There couldn’t have been more than 8 people in the church. Rich and I were at the altar. Kathy’s father led her up the aisle. The preacher said, “Wait a minute. Don’t you people know you’re supposed to stand up when the bride comes down the aisle? This is your rehearsal too. You need to rehearse your part as the audience.” So everybody stood up.

I turned to Rich and said, “That’s the way it is with these religious people. You never know if you’re supposed to stand up, sit down, kneel, cross yourself, or whatever.” We both cracked up. It was especially funny because that’s what Protestants often say when they come to a Catholic Church. Here we had three former Catholics in a Protestant wedding and I was feeding the same lines that the Protestants always say about Catholics.

My only official duty as the best man was to hand Rich the ring. We practiced many many times. He would hold out his hand palm up beneath my hand and I would drop the ring into his hand. I did not want to embarrass myself by dropping the ring.

On June 23, 1979, Rich Logan and Kathy Willaert were married and I was fortunate enough to be there as the best man. Frank was on standby. I successfully dropped the ring into Rich’s hand as we had practiced. Kathy’s sister handed her the ring and they dropped it. It rolled all over the floor. I’m not generally the kind of person who takes pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. But I was so happy that if a ring was going to get dropped, it wasn’t me who dropped it.

They had a small reception at Rich’s parents’ house and in his backyard. Frank got them a particularly nice wedding present. He knew they didn’t have a honeymoon planned so he rented a fancy suite in a downtown hotel. He ordered a steak and egg breakfast for them even though it wasn’t on the menu. Together we chipped in some cash so that they could have some spending money in addition to whatever other gift I got for them. I don’t recall what my wedding present was.

That day, I spent a total of five hours out of bed between the wedding and the reception afterward. It was the longest I had been out of bed in nearly 3 months.

As mentioned in other episodes, I went to see the original Star Wars with the Logans. We went back a year later to see it again. We saw all of the other Star Wars films except for “Rogue One”. We couldn’t go to that one because I was in the hospital getting my trach installed in 2016. A little over a year ago they released “Rogue One” in theaters and so we went back and saw it together even though we had all seen it on streaming or DVD. That completed the set. We’ve seen every Star Wars movie in the theater together – some of them more than once.

The three of us frequently went to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on qualifying days and had a wonderful time there together. We saw many track records broken on several of those days.

Another fond memory… Rich and I went to a very memorable Colts game on Halloween night in 1988 against the Denver Broncos. It was carried on Monday Night Football. The Colts clobbered Denver 55-23. Our fans began taunting John Elway every time he made a mistake shouting “El-way, El-way” to mock him. Longtime Colts fans will tell you it was one of the greatest games we ever played and Rich and I were there to see it in person. It was a great event and a fond memory.

In those days, my family owned a cabin on a lake in Brown County. Rich and Kathy were frequent guests there. The YouTube version of this podcast shows some of the fun times we had at the lake. The video is from 1984.

We have seen countless movies and been to many sporting events – way more than I can remember. I have lots of other stories that I will save for appropriate times.

Rich is the brother I never had. Kathy is a very dear friend. I could not ask for more loyal caring and loving people in my life. They really are extraordinary.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. We’ve had our ups and downs. Our misunderstandings and disagreements. Even the production of this episode has been a challenge that we had to work through together.

When I used to teach Catholic inquiry classes at my church, there was a lesson about Old Testament prophets. While we normally think of a prophet as someone who predicts the future, a big part of the job is to be a spokesperson for God. Sort of like a Press Secretary. Typically a prophet’s message is to call you back to God when you go astray. Most of the prophets spoke to the entire chosen people but occasionally a prophet’s guidance is personal as in the case of the prophet Nathan who is best buddies with King David. Nathan didn’t hesitate to tell David what an ass he was being for having an affair with Bathsheba. I teach that sometimes we are called to be prophets to our friends or to have them be prophets to us and call us back when we go astray.

That’s the kind of relationship I have with the Logans. They love me enough to let me know when I screw up and they know that because I respect them and cherish our friendship I will listen to them and try to do better. There are lots of examples. One day I told a horrendously sexist joke in a computer class and later Rich called me out saying simply, “I thought your comments in class today were out of character.” I will never forget those exact words. The phrase “out of character” never had more meaning than it did that day. What he was saying with those three simple words is, “The Chris that I know and love isn’t the kind of person who would say such a thing. The Chris I know and love is better than that.” He was right. That may have been who I was in that moment but it’s not who I normally am and it’s not who I aspire to be. True friends see the best in us and motivate us to be the person they know we can be.

The occasions when the Logans have been a prophet who called me to be my better self far outnumber the occasions when I’ve returned the favor.

Scripture says “A faithful friend is a life-saving elixir…” Sirach 6:16. I’ve been blessed by many such friends.

I’ve been running with Logan for nearly 50 years and look forward to many more years of Logan’s Run and a blessed friendship.

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.