1968 Recollections from the time the CS Department was formed at MSU

I was an undergrad at MSU from 1962-66, and an MS student from 66-68 (I left the semester before the department was founded). My first class in CS, in 1964, was at the time the CDC 3600 was on order (delivery delayed), and we ran our programs on a CDC 160-A computer, located on the second floor of the Computer Lab. We programmed in CDC's FORTRAN-II, a marvelous language that let us freely intersperse lines of assembly code with our FORTRAN statements! At that time, it was pretty easy to figure out what assembly code the FORTRAN compiler would generate, so you could manipulate the accumulator yourself, when you wanted. Glenn Keeney taught the course, and it awoke in me a passion for computing that would never leave. When the 3600 arrived, we had the best university computing capability in the world, I think, for a time. After FORTRAN, the next course taught was assembly language, and Dr. Laura (last name forgotten???), a Ph.D. chemist, taught it. I assisted her as "native informant" in the assembly language course, since her expertise was really in FORTRAN and scientific algorithms. By the time I left MSU in 1968, we already had the (infamous) compiler sequence, which the future employers of our students loved, but which challenged our students significantly. In the 60's, we did not actually write a compiler, but wrote algorithms to do many of the tasks a compiler has to do (parsing, space allocation, garbage collection, code generation, etc.). When I took it, it was taught by a Ph.D. student, I think, whose name I cannot now remember. Bill Burdette was in many of the same classes with me. We had classes in formal languages which I loved, and Carl Page taught us automata theory and got me excited about continuing my studies at the research group where he had just earned his Ph.D., the Logic of Computers Group at the University of Michigan.

If we had had a formal computer science major when I was here, I would have elected it. Instead, I earned my B.S. in math, then enrolled in philosophy (taking courses like logic, philosophy of language, logical foundations of probability, etc.), and finally finished the M.S. in Systems Science. In fall, 1968, I went down the road to do my Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences, then returned on the EESS faculty in 1971 (and CS already existed at that point).

by Erik Goodman (faculty) on 2008-09-12 08:47:18

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