W.M.U.
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan
(1964 - 1966)

Created Programs for Faculty as Machine Room Supervisor at WMU

 

My Experience Programming at W.M.U.

To complete my Mathematics major degree requirements, I took a Computer Programming Math class at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The class was taught by Professor Jack Meagher, who was also the director of the Mathematics Department's Computer Laboratory. We learned about machine language, assembler language, and Fortran, completing programming exercises in the Computer Laboratory. I found the class very fun and interesting. I chatted with a classmate who was already working with computers. He expanded my interest in programming with his stories of "Garbage In, Garbage Out", the first computer "bug" (an actual moth caught inside a computer), and other Computer lore. He was working at a nearby NORAD installation, and offered to give me a tour. I was fascinated to watch the darkened room full of computer screens where folks were monitoring airplane flights picked up by the NORAD RADAR sites. He added a bogus plane as he normally did as part of his system testing job. The lobby contained many interesting displays of large computer parts.         When Professor Jack Meagher saw my success at programming in his class and laboratory, he offered me a Graduate Assistant position to work in his Computer Laboratory and help students with their programming assignments. I accepted and combined that work while earning my Masters degree in Mathematics. I occassionally taught the class lecture for Jack. After I finished my graduate classes, Jack hired me as Machine Room Supervisor to continue my duties there. My new responsibilities required creating statistical analysis programs for faculty members to analyse their research results.         While working at the Computer Laboratory, I found I was having trouble remembering numerical phone numbers. I felt that equivalent alphabetic codes would be easier to remember, so I created a complicated FORTRAN program that, given a phone number, would list all letter combinations that would ring that phone when entered into a telephone keypad. A computer science professor at another university published a FORTRAN programming textbook that included a copy of my program as an example of great programming, but he failed to give me credit for writing it.