S.U.C.O.
State University of New York
College at Oswego
(1970 - 1974)
Teaching Computer Science as Assistant
Professor at SUCO
My Experience Programming at SUCO |
I was assigned teaching a few basic FORTRAN programming classes and a couple more advanced classes. The basic class included teaching about "machine language", the cumbersome numeric instruction codes that tell the computers what to do. It is normally too difficult for students to experiment with machine language programming, but I was convinced they could not learn the concept without trying their own exercise solutions. So I invented "MALIC", Machine Language for an Imaginary Computer, and had my students solve programming exercises using it. I wrote a FORTRAN program to emulate my imaginary computer. It would read the students' MALIC programs and run them as the imaginary computer would. This was a very effective teaching tool, and the other instructors asked to use it in their class sections too. Later, faculty at other colleges used it also. I added an official class on Systems Programming and led my students in rewriting the operating system for the computer lab's IBM 1130 Computer. We changed it from a general purpose computer to a student training computer. Much of the manual work done by the hired operators was now done by the 1130 itself! My students accepted assignments to add student-oriented features to the 1130's operating system. I shared our programming improvements with other colleges using 1130 computers. My photo of my Systems Programming students:  |
| During the summers, I
explored the computing capabilities available to the students by solving software challenges of interest to me. I used FORTRAN to create a software system to produce sheet music on the plotter. Example plot from my FORTRAN program that reads a song in my own language for specifying music notation, optionally transposes it to other keys, and prints it on a plotter:   |
| After teaching my last
classes at SUCO, I spent some time finishing up my personal programming project: a FORTRAN program to draw 3-D sketches on the 1130's plotter. My program created 3-D pairs of drawings that could be viewed in 3-D by placing them in a stereoscope antique viewer. |
