Being an Engineering student in the early 80's

College Majors Engineering Majors
21

<p>Michigan State Univ - 1984-1985 School Year (Pre EE major)

  • Introductory programming courses using Waterloo Pascal…running on IBM 370 architecture and MVS operating system</p>

<ul>
<li><p>A 1-credit “FORTRAN for Pascal Programmer’s” course…using Waterloo FORTRAN</p></li>
<li><p>Lab assignments were kept on 5 1/4" floppy discs</p></li>
<li><p>There was only one main computer lab. You received you alloted lab time which was part of the course. Additional lab time was basically survival of the fittest and quickest.</p></li>
<li><p>The Calculus sequence used the book: Calculus and Analytic Geometry. by Edwards and Penney. (a.k.a. the masters of confusion)</p></li>
<li><p>Not only was Introductory Chemistry required…a course in Inorganic Chemistry (with lab) was required also.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>1985-1986 School Year (still Pre EE major)

  • Electric Circuits and Electronics lab sequence was taken. SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) was used. SPICE is a general-purpose, open source analog electronic circuit simulator.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Also, the engineering advisors for some reason insisted on students taking Calculus III (vectors) instead of Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. The resulted in EE professors trying to give students a “crash course” in Diff Eqs & Linear Algebra to solve circuit equations. Why not have Linear Algebra as the 3rd math course taken in beyond me.</p></li>
<li><p>Only took Discrete Structures as only CS course as I has enough programming (at the time) for an EE major.</p></li>
<li><p>Very demanding year as the Physics sequence was introduced also, so your schedule (for whole year) was Electric Circuits, Physics, Math, CS and Gen Ed.</p></li>
<li><p>Discrete Structures course had little to no PC interaction.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>1986-1987 School Year

  • Did not get admitted to EE major (had way below the 3.3 GPA needed) and could not get admitted to backup major CS (3.2 GPA min for admission), so I had to find a new major.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>MSU’s math department introduces the Computational Mathematics major…which followed suit with MSU having alternative majors for limited-admission major “rejects”, like Food Systems Management or Economics (business rejects), Physics w/Electronics Option (EE rejects), etc.</p></li>
<li><p>MSU’s math department also creates new computer lab for the math and stat majors with SUN Sparcstations. The math majors agreed to keep this hush-hush so it would never get crowded. The lab had cushy seats and all.</p></li>
<li><p>Had to still use main computer lab for my Assembly Language course because we had to take ‘C’ programs and convert to machine code to manipulate the registers to simulate programming in Assembly Language. The machines running C & Assembly were Zeniths using XENIX (a UNIX clone). Used the SUN Sparcs as an efficient typewriter (for semester 1) as it was connected to nice printers.</p></li>
<li><p>2nd semester was a traditional “data structures” course in ‘C’. I did all of my work on the SUN Sparcs. CS majors were asking me and other math major “when were we in the lab?” because they rarely saw us there. Of course we did not tell them they we were working on SUN Sparcs…lol</p></li>
</ul>

<p>1987-1988 School Year

  • The SUN Sparcs had compilers for PROLOG and LISP which were two of the languages surveyed in the “Organization of Programming Languages” course.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Used the Sparcs for the Numerical Anlaysis year-long course sequence (wrote programs in ‘C’)</p></li>
<li><p>Used the Sparcs for the Operating Systems course. By that time, the CS majors knew about the Math department’s lab. The main lab had Sparcs too by now but our lab (math department) was much “cooler” and in the same building as the CS faculty…for easier access to CS professors.</p></li>
<li><p>Typed resume and other reports on MAC PC’s at the main lab but used the SPARCS as the backup.</p></li>
<li><p>Very little programming for Computer Networks and Optimization courses. NONE for Database course as we used the C.J. Date book as the text.</p></li>
</ul>

22

<p>^ We called those guys Asian lovers because they usually hang out with Asian girls.</p>

23

<p>“Why not have Linear Algebra as the 3rd math course taken in beyond me.”</p>

<p>Absolutely. I took three semesters of Calculus and Analytic Geometry (two semesters were required,) and then I took Linear Algebra as a math elective. In 30 years, I have never had to program anything related to differentiation or integration, but I use Linear Algebra all the time.</p>

24

<p>I used Sparc and C for computer graphics class. FORTRAN and VAX/VMS for numerical analysis. VAX/Unix and C for data structure, compiler, and database design classes. PDP-11 for assembly language.</p>

25

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<p>Guilty as charged. Asians #1 and #2 were, ehem, not a good fit :slight_smile: but we’re still good friends 30 years later. Asian #3 lucked out and became Mrs. Turbo.</p>

26

<p>^ Good for you!</p>

27

<p>And just in case our young audience asks the question “where am I ever going to use X, Y, or Z”.</p>

<p>My graduate CS research focused on knowledge representation and natural language processing. Took a VAX-11/780 to run. Thirty years later, I’m working on semantic webs and likely natural language processing, except it’s all embedded in some gadget or another. </p>

<p>I’m reading the stuff about ABOX and TBOX and almost became teary-eyed. All this time wasted coding Prolog and Lisp, Computational Theory, Denotational Semantics, sigh.</p>

<p>To top it off, the project lead assigned me to work on the web portal in my spare time since I mentioned I’ve done .NET programming.</p>

<p>All in the day of a software engineer/code monkey.</p>

28

<p>.NET programming. Yuck!. It’s not easier than the old timer languages. Besides we did not have to read tons of MS things except online man and some books.</p>

29

<p>Of course, there were no AutoCAD programs! Since I was an architectural engineering major, I had to take two architectural design classes. We sat on tall chairs at drafting boards. We had to learn to write letters perfectly, with straight edges. I had a head start, because my dad was an engineering professor and used to bring lettering books home for me to practice in when I was little. (Side note: Although AutoCAD started to become more common in the late 80s, even in 1992 some work was done manually. I remember being nine months pregnant and trying to do drafting on a bridge project! In business clothes, since offices were more formal then.)</p>

<p>Entering data for the structural design of buildings was very tricky. You had to type it in, line by line. There were no graphics to help you. It was SO easy to make a mistake and difficult to discover if you had made one!</p>

<p>I went to UT Austin - tuition was $4 a credit hour. Total bill for the semester would be around $250. I think the private dorm (and meal plan) my parents splurged on for me (waiters served meals and we had a beautiful swimming pool) cost about $4,000 per year.</p>

<p>My boyfriend attended MIT, and I couldn’t believe that his parents had to pay $11,000 for tuition, room, and board!</p>

<p>I wrote my master’s thesis on my boyfriend’s fancy computer that had 256k memory. That was in 1986.</p>

<p>I got a fellowship to grad school. Besides having my tuition paid for, I received an annual stipend of $10,000, which wasn’t taxed in those days. I had more disposable income than I do now, ha!</p>

30

<p>For 80s undergrads who weren’t CS majors you guys were sure spoiled with those Sun machines. Did they have CDE?</p>

31

<p>Right at the end of the 70s, a bunch of us (finishing high school) breadboarded together a home computer based on the 8088, which was the hot thing then. I can’t believe how excited that processor made us (we programmed it it in assembly language, the first of many obsolete programming languages I’ve worked with…)</p>

<p>Soon after that started programming in BASIC and learned SPSS. Actually wrote programs in one city and ran them on the Honeywell in Fairbanks, Alaska via microwave links! About the same time (81?) I also got a job where we programmed in BMDP from Alaska and ran it on a mainframe in Seattle (talk about proto cloud computing)…
[now that I think about it, didn’t the Honeywell have some insane feature like 36bit word size with 9 bit characters? That was odd even then.]</p>

<p>In about 82 I was working as a programmer and going to school (programming in FORTRAN IV and SPSS) and wrote games at home on the Commodore 64 (in 82, it ran on a mutant version of the 8088 IIRC, I wrote in C64 assembly language. The pixels in my maze and monsters graphics game were about the size of dimes. Heh.) Before that I wrote simple programs in BASIC on a Sinclair. That damn thing only had 4K of RAM and used a cassette deck for a ‘hard drive’.</p>

<p>About that time I scored a scientific calculator out of an ad in Scientific American, it was about 1/5 price because it calculated some values of arcsin incorrectly, but otherwise worked fine, so it was ‘damaged goods’ and fell into my price range. I could use a slide rule, but only for fun. And since I’m confessing to old school proclivities, at about this time I built a 10m band ham radio that actually (I’m not kidding) transmitted in Morse Code and featured a big power vacuum tube.</p>

<p>In 81/82 I had a job doing statistical programming/surveys for some guy at the university who was too old school for his own good - he insisted that we work with the already obsolete Hollerith cards. Working with those really, really blew. You’d put a big data set with code into the reader, about 2/3 of the deck would feed in (sounded like an avalanche) and then the reader would shred one of the cards. I’d have to dig out the pieces and punch out a new ^&%& card. While he was away I put the whole mess on mag tapes and worked with those instead. We also used BITNET for e-mail and some predecessor to Gopher for FTP (can’t remember what the program was called), together sort of a poor man’s internet.</p>

<p>About that time we started getting modern looking computer labs, nice CRTs for programming. On the other hand the printers were pretty funny. The 132 column dot-matrix printers were huge and noisy. I also had a printer on a line that only could achieve 30 baud(!) I have no idea how it could have been so slow… maybe the tokens got stuck in the ethernet tubes… :)</p>

<p>By 83/84 I was programming in C, running on VAX or PDP-11 (68000). I only used C on the PDP, never learned MACRO-11. That was a fun computer to play with, wonder if I could dig one up at this late date? To add to the list of programming languages I no longer use, I needed two classes to finish my degree (summer school) so I took Pascal and VAX assembly language. I wrote papers in EDT, which was the text editor that came with DEC machines and another editor called troff.</p>

<p>Now that I’m being nostalgic, how many of you built projects from Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American (and played games from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in the same magazine)?</p>

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</p>

<p>CDE was announced in 1993.</p>

<p>The Sun 3 computers (Motorola 68000-based; the SPARC-based ones came later) did have graphical displays (grayscale) with the X windowing system. With 4 Mbytes of RAM, they were rather slow if someone used emacs (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping) tended on them, especially the diskless ones that had swap space on an NFS server.</p>

<p>Emacs’ memory usage resulted in various stripped-down editors with similar key binding as emacs being written.</p>

<p>For writing papers and books, troff was useful for typesetting for printing; nroff was similar but for formatting text on the screen (such as Unix man pages). Those writing papers heavy with mathematical symbols preferred LaTeX. For all of these systems, you embedded formatting commands into your text that you wrote in a text editor like vi or emacs.</p>

33

<p>“I wrote my master’s thesis on my boyfriend’s fancy computer that had 256k memory. That was in 1986.”</p>

<p>I did all my 1987-1989 graduate school papers on an Amiga with a thermal printer. It cost me $200 to upgrade from 256K of memory to 512K. My professors were always threatening to flunk me unless I bought a decent printer.</p>

<p>I originally bought the Amiga because I could program it to draw fractals, although it would take all night to draw one image.</p>

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<p>And that’s why I did not become an architect… I don’t mind 2D elevations, even tho ADHD makes it torturous, but doing 3D by hand… By contrast DD1 can focus on what the thing should look like using any of a number of 2D/3D programs she has mastered, rather than how to draw it.</p>

<p>Another flash from the past, Rotrig rapidographs (these ink-spewing thingies that one would use on mylar (?) paper to ink their final design). Expensive, had to be cleaned every time, and clogged on occasion.</p>

<p>Or, to the horror of model airplane builders and aspiring architects Elbonia-wide. I grew up in Elbonia without super-glue…</p>

35

<p>I took “Engineering Graphics” and had to buy a vinyl bag of drawing instruments. A compass, a bendable curve, triangles, are some of the items along with special graph paper. Obviously no drawings could be done on the computer. </p>

<p>My senior design project in EE was programming a robotic arm. It was just a few simple movements but it was a huge hit at the fair at the end of the year.</p>

36

<p>Great stuff! Do any of you remember when email was introduced on college campuses? First time I used email was in 1991- a Netcom UNIX shell account- the email client was called Pine lol. When did those become available on college campuses?</p>

37

<p>I made a mistake earlier. I used Sun-2 VME, not Sparc Sbus for computer graphics.</p>

38

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<p>I used e-mail on campus as early as in 1982. But it’s available only for students enrolled in classes that required computer access. It was not not used for social networking because people never expected that someone would sent them mail.</p>

39

<p>We had email on Multics in 1982 - this included the awesome escape sequence hack - previrus… Unix mail in 83.</p>

40

<p>Sun workstations actually ran SunView before X probably late 80s. Then updated to that cool but nonstandard mix of X11 and display postscript and finally CDE. I programmed some heavy duty GUIs back then…</p>