First post on a new blog is the place to introduce myself. As the home page says I am currently (this was written in October 2017) an Affiliate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. I officially “retired” in 2013 and was immediately re-appointed on an honorary basis, doing most of what I did before: teaching and research. I have since reduced my teaching to one course per year plus helping out with small sequences of lectures in other courses (eg introducing Python to a first class etc) and the odd lecture in other courses. I continue to do research at the same level as before retirement.
History – part 1
My history at the University of Sydney goes back a long long way. I started as an undergraduate student in 1968 (so that means 2017 was my 50th year at USyd!) enrolled in a Science degree. I had always been interested in computers from about age 8 when I was given a book on Science that had a couple of pages on computers. I “learned” Fortran from a book in late high school but had no way to run programs until I convince a physics tutor to let me use his account on the IBM 7040 housed in the School of Physics. Running the program involved typing punch cards and submitting the deck over the counter to an operator, then waiting a day until the cards and printout came back in a pigeonhole for the account. In 1969 I enrolled in Psychology and all students in the course had to be a subject for an experiment. I found that one of the experiments involved a PDP8 computer (also in Physics) that was used to measure reaction times, so I signed up. The researcher (Bill King) was very kind and lent me a book on programming in machine code for the PDP8. This involved writing instructions in assembler on paper and hand translating into binary machine instructions – this was fairly easy since the machine had an almost trivial instruction set and 12 bit words. My first program was a simple loop to count and display the result and Bill let me hand enter the program via switches on the front panel and run it. At this point I was completely hooked on computers.
I rapidly progressed to other computers and languages and enrolled in a newly established 2nd year computer course, mainly because it gave me my own account to run Fortran programs. After another year I had learned machine code for the IBM 7040, the KDF9 (interesting stack architecture) and a CDC 1700 (along with the PDP8 one of the first “minicomputers”). I also learned Algol, and assembler for each machine. By 1971 I had an operator “licence” for all the machines in the Computer Centre and was doing odd programming jobs for people.
I did Computer Science Honours in 1972 and received first class honours. This was a breakthrough because first class honours had not been given out for several years before then. The academic staff were a bit mean with marks in those days! The year 1972 is also very special because that was when I met my life partner (Prof.) Judy Kay (we have now (in 2017) been married for 42 years, 3 children, 2 grandchildren)(update 2019 - 4 grandchildren!).
Here are a few highlights/milestones of my journey through the world of computers and computer science:
I started a PhD in computer Science in 1973 supervised by J Ross Quinlan, inventor of machine learning (ID3 etc). My topic was “parallel parsing algorithms”.
In 1974 the first widely available microprocessor appeared, the Intel 8080 (preceded by the 8008 and 4004). In 1975 Mos Technology released the 6502 that was eventually to be used in the Apple 1 and Apple II. In 1975 I got my hands on one of the first single board microcomputers, the “JOLT” (I still have one and the Computer History Museum has one). It had an 8 bit MOS6502 CPU, 4K of static RAM, a dual UART and a PIA (parallel I/O). The UART was used to drive an ASR33 Teletype for character I/O. This was less powerful than a microcontroller found on an Arduino board today, but was amazing at the time.
In 1977 I got my first job at the University of Sydney (I had a 77 staff number) as a research assistant writing code for the JOLT to send/receive packets from a satellite transceiver connected to a large antenna on the roof. We had a partner in Tohoku University in Japan that had gained access to an out of service geo-stationary satellite parked over the Pacific. The on-board transceiver was still usable and we started exchanging messages with Tohoku.
I was offered a 3 year lectureship at the beginning of 1978 which was converted to tenure track in 1979 and tenured in 1980.