WEBmikey: How I became a scientist

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How I became a scientist
9.04.2006 10:10 AM \| Link	The other day George and I chatted a bit about our past academic days, and it really made me stop and think about the things I studied at college. I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Oklahoma. I mainly chose OU because I didn't really want to move away from home, and it was an easy commute from my parents' house. At the time, you could get a CS degree in either the School of Engineering or the School of Arts & Sciences, and I went with the Engineering degree because it sounded cooler (even though it had more requirements and core engineering classes, such as Engineering Physics, that I simply hated!). Studying computer science sure was different in 1985! Strangely enough, my first semester was the last semester that OU used punch cards, so I actually had to type out Fortran programs on punch cards and submit them to an operator to be loaded and run, and then wait for those wide green-bar printouts to show me if my program bombed or actually computed compounded interest (or something like that) correctly. I still have a box of those printouts and a deck of punch cards in my garage somewhere! After my first semester though, I was a full-fledged user of the computer lab, so I could slave over a terminal as long as I wanted (or had to). Even though I'm sure the internet existed in some form, no one really had access to any of it at home - the concept of a web page was never even mentioned during my entire course of study for my degree! This meant that all of my homework had to be done in the lab, so I spent lots of time there - I can remember coming home at 3:00 AM many, many times (of course, some of that time was dabbling in MUDs and printing PostScript blueprints of Star Trek ships). Besides core classes and math, most of my classes were just more and more programming languages, although there were things like Compiler Construction and Large Scale Scientific Computing, which was interesting since we were allowed time on the big expensive parallel processing computer (like just about everyone has on their desk now!). I had to write stuff in Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Lisp, ADA, C, C++, and even Smalltalk. I was supposed to learn Assembly Language, too, but my professor was really innovative. He knew that Assembly was totally dead, so he invented a way for us to learn it without actually writing it. We wrote a C program to emulate the 6502 processor! To test our program, our professor loaded a BASIC interpreter and then ran a BASIC program to compute digits of Pi, so there were kind of three levels going on - it was amazing, and I enjoyed that class more than any other CS course. The grand finale was two semesters of Software Engineering, where groups of four students built a "product" from start to finish, complete with all the documentation and so on. Basically, the professor had everyone build applications that he needed, so our free slave labor resulted in a bibliography generator and reference database program. In the second semester the four of us would meet in someone's dorm room and work almost all night on various deliverables we had to turn in. I can remember sometimes we would take turns sleeping, and someone would go out and buy this cheese bread that was fantastic so late at night. Those were crazy days, since I was married and also working full-time, but I survived! It's fun thinking about all of this now, but my favorite college memories have nothing to do with computer science - I'll write about those another time. Labels: memories


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