1968 Department Beginnings

When I came to MSU in the fall of 1966 I didn't even know what a computer was. But all engineering freshmen had to take CS101-FORTRAN Programming and I immediately fell in love with the computer. I was majoring in Engineering Science, but keeping my options open. When the CS department was given the privilege of granting degrees in the fall of 1968, I immediately switched my major to CS and was one of the first seven graduates (six guys and one girl) in the spring of 1969. That year they began a graduate program as well and I remained at MSU, getting my MS in 1971 (in parallel with getting an MBA at the same time). In the process, I took every course that the department had to offer, so I declined to stay on for my PhD - but I did get a PhD in Information Systems many years later.

The early years were ones of constant change. In preparation of the installation of the CDC 6500 one class assignment was to write an assembler for 6500 assembler but it had to run on the CDC 3600. Then for the spring quarter we had to write a simulator (also running on the 3600) that would execute the binary code we had produced in the winter quarter. All those registers on the 6500! What a powerful machine it seemed at the time.

Everything was on cards. You punched them yourself on the old IBM 023 keypunches, then (if you were smart) immediately ran a listing of them so if you dropped them you knew how to put the deck back together. One afternoon, coming back across the bridge next to the computer center that was over the Red Cedar River, I came upon an unfortunate soul who had not made a listing and he had dropped his deck on the surface of the bridge, many of them going under the railing and into the river. He was so disgusted that he was in the process of kicking all the remaining cards under the railing into the river - hours and hours of work ruined!

In graduate school, we also got to use the plotter with its expensive wide paper. During my computer graphics class they also borrowed a "pin plotter" for the semester. You programmed x/y/z coordinates for a shape (with z being <= 2"). The machine moved a spool of copper wire under the foam board to the x/y coordinates, spun off enough wire to penetrate the board and go up to the z coordinate, then cut off the wire under the board. A lot of work, and a tremendous expense to "draw" half of an egg shape represented by the ends of the wires. But such was the technology of the times.

All the original faculty taught courses - Dr. Page (my advisor), Dr. Reid, Dr. Dubes, Dr. Keeney (whom I worked under at an assistantship in the Admin building), Mr. Burnett. During my graduate years I also had the opportunity to teach the intro FORTRAN and COBOL classes as a grad assistant - running the class live in the morning with TV hookups to other locations on campus, then having it played back again in the afternoon and again in the evening. The following Tuesday evening they replayed the week's tapes for those who had missed a class, then reused the tapes - wish they could have been saved for posterity.

by Alan Russell (alumni) on 2008-08-09 19:22:53

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