S.U.C.O.
State University of New York
College at Oswego
(1970 - 1974)

Teaching Computer Science as Assistant Professor at SUCO

Courses Taught:		FORTRAN Assembler Numerical Analysis Computer Graphics Systems Programming

Some of my computer science students at work in the Computer Lab

( The sign above was my attempt to remind students to save the
rubber bands they wrapped around their card deck programs. )

Students' Comments
Tim Masters: (5/8/15)		Mr Boynton (I still have to call you this!) - Many thanks to Carol for pointing me to you. I've wanted to contact you for many years to tell you that in my years of college (all the way to PhD in statistics) you were hands-down the best professor I ever had. Your teaching skills and dedication to students set you apart. Your influence on me was profound. Thank you!
Carol Pogust:		I second that !
Tim Masters:		What I remember most about your teaching was your MALIC language. When I tell people that the first computer language I was taught was assembler, they find it hard to believe. But if I ever taught programming, I would do the same. What a wonderful introduction to computers!
Ted Blank: (5/19/15)		Norm, I want to echo Tim Masters' comments below, and also thank Carol P. for making the connection to our "Mr. Boynton" from SUNY Oswego days. I was a Chemistry major at SUNY College of Forestry (as it was called then) for 2.5 years but drifted into programming (in APL of all things) in my spare time there. When I finally decided to make CS my major there were only three SUNY locations that offered a BS in Computer Science - Buffalo, Stony Brook and Oswego. Since I had most of my general electives out of the way I "only" had to take 5 computer courses in each of 3 semesters to finish in 4 years, so I saw a lot of you (and vice versa). I loved every minute and hour and overnight and weekend of it. Thank you for teaching us the art and beauty as well as the science of programming. I still remember your MUSIC language that drove the plotter to create sheet music. I retired back in 2007 from a 26-year career at IBM and have worked at Oracle since then. It is not overstating to say I owe it all to you, as each of us is the product of our teachers as well as our parents. Hats off to you for doing it right. Best wishes to you and all your family. Ted Blank - Oswego class of '74 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:
My Polaroid photo of my Systems Programming students:
Ted Blank:		With punch cards and felt-tip pens in the pocket - well prepared for 24 years with IBM. Printer behind Carol, card reader behind me, IBM 1130 out of pic to the right. Thanks for the pic!
Carol Pogust:		Somehow, even without pockets, I was well prepared for 40 (and a half !) years at IBM : -) Still have my flow-charting template and my 1130 reference card:

My Experience Teaching at Oswego

SUCO is in Oswego, New York, on the Lake Ontario shore. It gets severe winter "lake effect" snow storms there. The walks from dorms to classroom buildings included ropes for students to grab to pull themselves to class against the extremely strong winds blowing off the Lake.  I purchased a mobile home in Kalamazoo, loaded it with my few belongings, and had it delivered to an Oswego trailer park while I drove my Volkswagen there. I taught there for four years and usually drove back to visit my family in Michigan several times each year. I was assigned teaching a few basic FORTRAN programming classes and a couple more advanced classes. I was given a syllabus and textbook for each class, but I was required to create my own lectures, assignment exercises, and exams, which I was already doing at MSU. The basic class included teaching about "machine language", the cumbersome numeric instruction codes that tell 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 that 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.  It soon became obvious that my students were learning programming better than those in the other instructors' classes. This was due to several factors: I stayed at the computer laboratory assisting students with their programming exercises for many hours, usually until late at night. I created clever programming exercise assignments that forced the students to solve the problems using only the tools I taught them.  I created concise handout sheets summarizing the available programming tools.  And my assistance was only to guide them toward their own solution; never to show them the solution. As students were appreciating my teaching success, they came to me for independent study classes.  I turned one of those into an official class on Systems Programming. My students rewrote the operating system for the computer lab's IBM 1130 Computer and 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 their programming improvements with other colleges using 1130 computers.  My most interesting assignment was for each student to create a special startup single card machine language program to make the 1130 do something interesting. A computer punch card normally had room for eighty characters, but in a special keypunch mode, multiple codes could be typed into each card column position to create a startup program. A popular solution was to create an interesting animated pattern in the 1130's display lights, such as a rotating marquee message or circling lights.  Other students made it read another punch card or punch a new card, react to changing some toggle switches, or draw a pattern on its drum plotter.  The plotter fed paper forward and backward on a sprocketed drum and moved a pen back and forth across the paper as the drum turned. I suggested an imaginative goal:  Pretend the plotter is a remote controlled robot, and imagine setting it upside-down on the floor with the drum as a big wheel and the pen as a steering mechanism, and then interpret toggle switch settings as commands to move forward, backward, right, left, or stop.  Several students wrote such robot programs. The biggest challange was to get the complicated program to fit on one card. In my fourth year of teaching, the University changed its requirement policy to insist that all instructors must have PhD degrees.  Since I had no intention of going back to get that degree, I was to be dismissed at the end of the acedemic year. Ironically, at about that time, many of my students nominated me for the campus Excellence in Teaching Award.  I was apparently in the lead among student voters.  My department head asked me to decline the nomination, since winning and then being fired would embarrass the University.  But I refused, so the University later announced that I was being disqualified from the competition because I would not be returning the following year. One year, meteorologists held a conference on blizzards at our Oswego hotel.   Appropriately, that conference got snowed in for several days by a huge lake effect blizzard!  I can remember the snow piling up six feet high or more at my trailer.