I followed in the Ivy League tradition begun by my brother, and my university, Cornell, was about 150 mile from Buffalo. I was accepted into the Engineering school which did not have a foreign language requirement. During the drive home after my campus visit when I was in high school my father said that I should become a mechanical engineer. I never questioned this, and followed this course of study like a good son, and became a BSME.
I started college in 1967, however, from the beginning things began to change. During freshman orientation some of my high school friends, who were also accepted to Cornell, and I were wandering around and exploring the campus. Someone suggested that we check out the computer center. Arriving at Sibley Hall we saw the main CDC 1604 and its attached CDC 160A for I/O. While we were staring at it one of the computer operators came over and asked if we were interested in jobs. Of the four of us who applied, two of us got jobs there, and I continued for my remaining undergraduate years including summers (I never returned home for longer than two weeks after leaving for college). The computer center was undergoing drastic changes. They were getting rid of the CDC machines and acquiring IBM equipment. They were also moving out of the on-campus Sibley Hall and putting the IBM 360 Model 65 mainframe miles away at the airport’s Langmuir Lab and positioning three IBM 360 Model 20s on campus for remote job entry. During the school year I worked about sixteen hours a week, and the income was my spending money.
One of the side benefits of the job was free computer time. During this time FORTRAN was my language of choice, actually it was WATFIV (WATerloo FORTRAN IV). For example, I’d do a chemistry lab and then spend the week programming all the calculations while at work. However I learned that it would have been faster just sitting down and doing it by hand. This taught me that if you only run a program once it wasn’t worth doing.
During the early undergraduate years my core classes were all preset, and I had no ability to chose any electives except for liberal arts ones. However several of my engineering courses did require some computer programming. This was the time when calculations were done with slide rules and Computer Science was a graduate degree. In my final undergraduate year I became a teaching assistant to Dr. Robert Chase of School of Hotel Administration helping students in a beginning FORTRAN course. While doing this I was taking my FIRST university computer science course. Yet as the year went on I was able to take more computer science graduate courses include data structures and numerical analysis.
Backing up a bit… Sophomore year I applied for the cooperative engineering program. The interviewing process included Fortune 100 corporations, suits and ties and best of all free food and beer. I was surprised to be accepted by IBM thinking that I had a position with Xerox. This is just another of those encounters where my career fate depended on chance. So I worked for IBM the Fall of 1965 during my Junior year (having taken summer school to enable it), and then the summer of 1966 between my Junior and Senior year. I worked in Poughkeepsie, NY which was the mainframe powerhouse of the corporation. Each time there I met many people and learned many things including new languages such as APL, 360 Basic Assembler Language (BAL), and BSL (a PL/I like systems programming language).
Later I was told that I would never have been hired at IBM had I not been a coop especially when I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and in the poor economic climate (recession of 1971) at my graduation. I was told that the Poughkeepsie site hired only seven people that year whereas in previous years ten times more people would have been hired. So these meanderings lead me into a career with computers. How it happened was not by choice, but rather I would say again that it was by chance. Yet there were themes that now looking back seem obvious, but at the time so many other things could have happened. So I have the utmost respect for those people who know what they want to do and pursue it was singleminded determination, but my path was more oblique, more random.