Bray Days: Computer Lesson

Aside- Behold! A photo of the wall in my dorm room, where the nervous breakdown documented in this story happened. It is from move in day. Witness the Next Generation poster as proof of me trying desperately to be a fan, before giving up, following multiple seasons.

Besides learning about the health and general quality of life benefits of exercise, RPI taught me several other off the books lessons. Amazingly, some were specifically about study habits.
 I was able to finish two degrees in five years by taking extra courses some semesters, and coming in with a pile of AP credits from high school. This meant that my first college semester only had Chemistry and my Freshman recommended humanity (with no tests, only papers/ projects) as a standard “101” type of giant lecture class, and higher-level ones for everything else technical.
 
Thanksgiving week had no class Wednesday to Friday, and classes got individually cancelled on Monday and Tuesday, except for one. (Maybe...see second aside below)  My AP score placed me in Computing Fundamentals for Engineers II. Aside from the rather massive lesson yet to come, this class was also my introduction to “the curve.” I had seen curved test results for particularly difficult exams in high school, and I knew college ran grades on a statistical basis. What I was not prepared for is the average on the first quiz being in the low forties as the set point for a “B.” This wasn’t only the first quiz; it was how this instructor thought all evaluations should be run. In addition, while every single student in this class was there because we’d scored highly on the Pascal based Computer AP Test; he forced us all to work in FORTRAN. Yes, he was a delight.
 

Aside- FORTRAN and Pascal were programming languages we used back in the fossil days of my college career. They were slightly newer than the invention of the abacus . No we did not use punch cards...however, many of the systems and languages we did use had features based on punch cards.  Now get off my lawn!

 

I only had that one computer class keeping me from shattering my deep, first semester homesickness by several days less than if I attended it. They respected us as “adults,” making attendance in most classes not mandatory. Therefore, I drove home Friday afternoon instead of the following Tuesday, patting myself on the back for getting more family time.

Figuratively, I mean. It would be really hard to drive doing that.
 
The first Tuesday back, after a morning class, I passed Big Steve in the dorm hallway and asked if he was ready for the Computer's test that afternoon.
 
He told me that he had taken it that morning at Eight AM.
 
All normal “101” freshman classes had “F-Tests” set up at Eight AM to allow the huge groups to take the exam at the same time. NONE of my other AP boosted classes used the F-test time, since they were out of sync with the usual schedule and had reduced class sizes. This class also did not use the F-Test time for quizzes. Because the instructor was the type of guy who geared exams to have an average below fifty, he specially requested our smaller sized class to have the test in the early morning F-Test slot. He also never mentioned that fact until the day before break.
 
I had missed my very first college exam.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!

Aside- My daughter, who is now in college, correctly pointed out that my first exam could not have been right after Thanksgiving, and this must have taken place much earlier in the fall. As she also correctly points out, I am a fossil, making this happening occur a very long time ago and hard to remember. Therefore it is likely that I went home early for some other event or long weekend that I have no recollection of the details. It was definitely my first college test, since if it wasn't the first test, I would have known it was at 8AM after taking another one in that class.

 
I have no memory of any physical existence between being in the dorm hallway, and being in the instructor’s office. I either teleported there, or had an adrenaline surge large enough to violate some other law of physics. Thanks to his spectacular communication skills, there were several of us that had shown up at his office after having the same realization.
 
He offered us the option of doing an extra project, in a class that already had many. This offer came even though it was well before that day’s normal class time and he could have let us take the exam in one of the many empty rooms nearby. (Not that I'm still bitter or anything.) Though traumatized from the high school physics “Glass is a Liquid” fiasco, I grudgingly excepted extra project work as there was no other choice.
 
The fun didn’t end there.
 
He came up with a different project for each of us. Considering we couldn’t coordinate showing up at the right time for a class-wide test, I’m not sure what he was worried about. My assignment was to write a program with subroutines to do arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.) 
 
Yes, I realize today one could speak those requirements into the television remote and have the toaster output the results, but we were only a few years past, “You have to bang the rocks together, guys,” at that time.
 
Between piles of other work, including additional projects for CFE II, I worked out my program. Actually, like all of my computer endeavors, I worked out the logic needed for the program in the first five minutes, then spent weeks finding misspelled command words and numbering errors. Back in those fossil times, one couldn’t simply run a program. One would have to translate it through another program called a compiler, which converted the programming code into machine code the computer could understand. I’m pretty sure there were Flintstones like birds with chisels inside the machine that did this. Finally, after what I thought was a lot of grumbling and swearing in the old church that was converted into a computer center, I compiled my corrected code…

And accidentally saved it over the source code file.
 
This simultaneously wiped out evidence of the program I’d written and corrupted the machine code, preventing it from being both seen and run.
 
Then there was truly A LOT of grumbling and swearing, and I must have kicked one of the huge stone columns in the former Cathedral, because I walked with a limp, well before the Library Hill incident. (He said, using foreshadowing yet again.)
 
Back at Bray Hall, I was curled up into a ball of defeat. Jesse was a computer science major, but was also home for the weekend. Fortunately, I remembered that Tom was also a computer science major. With far more knowledge of how the school’s system worked than I ever grew into, he was able to restore the original file, allowing me to compile it correctly.
 
I bought him a calzone from the top notch Pizzeria in the area, Joe’s. Their notion of a calzone was an entire pizza folded in half and stuffed to exploding. We were full for the whole weekend.

 
Aside- Those who attended the many colleges in the “Capital District” were and are extremely lucky. The Albany/ Troy area is right between (at a ninety degree angle) New York City and Buffalo. Therefore, both high quality pizza AND wings were readily available. However, there were days where speed was far more important to a gang of hungry guys than quality was. This was usually Friday and Saturday nights when delivery time for the better places would run in the “hours” range. Though it was still the days of “rabbit turd sausage” topping, a Thirty Minute or Less order of a pie and wings from Domino’s would sometimes be a necessity.

 
I triumphantly turned in my program, along with a detailed, well-constructed write up explaining how it functioned and several, varied examples of each arithmetical operation.
 
However, the Instructor took off a pile of points because I had written quick transformations for subtraction and division that allowed the program to use the addition and multiplication subroutines, instead of writing two sets of duplicate subroutines. 
 
Yes, he gave me a B minus because I wrote efficient code.
 
On the positive side, for the next five years I never skipped a class again.

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