Daniel J. Dick

With that, the previous system administrator took off for Los Angeles, and I was left with a bunch of Fresno State Math professors who had joined the new Computer Science Department. And some needed help learning how to make their own Mac or PC work.

Video Projectors
and Macs
and Unix Machines,
Oh My!

A video projector hung from the ceiling in a classroom. It looked like a UFO with three big lenses, one for each of the primary colors. And there was a place to plug video cables in. This was not a normal HDMI setup.

The one at Fresno State didn’t look like the AI generated one above, but I had difficulty finding a matching image in the land of reality, so I begged ChatGPT to hallucinate one up for me. Now, how it is supposed to make the three colored images converge into one is beyond me. But I did not have to deal with that in real life. All I needed to do was give the readers something to laugh at.

And it needed set up ASAP.

Gift Computers at Fresno State

The faculty at Fresno State accepted a gift of an AT&T 3B5 for the Computer Science Department and a larger and more powerful 3B15 for the Agriculture department along with several AT&T Unix workstations.

These computers ran an old version of AT&T System V Unix that was slow in that it’s form of virtual memory and process management involved swapping whole processes into and out of memory, to and from the disk drives.

Later, Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) Unix and much later, AT&T SysV R4 used demand paged virtual memory. This made use of a memory management unit that would allow parts of processes or pages of memory to be paged in and out.

Thanks for the Virtual Memories

For a very simple and easy-to-read paper with colorful illustrations, Stanford has a greatly simplified explanation of how this works here: Stanford CS 111 Lecture 21.

In the 1990s when I studied Advanced Systems and Databases at the graduate level at Stanford University, I took a more rigorous course where we had to write operating system internals.

Convergent Technologies Miniframes

In the Computer Science Department, we received several Convergent Technologies Miniframe Unix machines. And nobody was familiar with any of them.

So, I rounded up a few student volunteers to help. First, we needed to set these workstations up for students to use them. Then we needed to wire our VAX to the network.

Did I say “network”? I am not talking about WiFi. I’m not even talking about CAT 5 ethernet cables and switches and routers and hubs. I’m literally talking about RS-232 serial lines.

UUCP – Email Via Phone Modems
Unix to Unix Copy

Oh, and our email communications with C.S.U. Stanislaus? Ha! Phone modem! Hayes modem. Hayes, and UUCP which stands for Unix-to-Unix-Copy. We would set up a schedule for Casey Leedom at Stanislaus and I to have our VAXen call each other, connect by phone modem, and transfer any UUCP requested data to the other system.

And did we have a driver for Hayes modems? Sure. After I wrote one! I grabbed the source code for another modem driver in C, copied it and modified it and put it into the works.

And that’s what we used to transfer email anywhere.

And you know how we use nice email addresses like joeblow@gmail.com? Not us. We had to use “bang” addresses. I would email to something like stanislaus!casey to reach Casey. And if I wanted to reach Eugene at NASA, I might use stanislaus!berkeley!nasaames!eugene.

CSci Department Loans me to Fresno State Engineering Department for Vax Fortran CAD/CAM Development Work

When the Engineering Department learned of my presence, they contacted the head of CSci and asked to borrow me.

Engineering West had a VAX 785 running VMS and several Tektronix graphics terminals. And they had some CAD/CAM programs written in Fortran.

The problem is, they were not written for those particular Tektronix color graphics terminals.

One program was GT/Strudl or Georgia Tech Structural Design Language. And I cannot remember what the name of the other system was.

Well, I got the work done quickly and tested it, and it worked well. So, the Computer Science Department Head wanted me back again ASAP to split my time between being a Unix Systems Manager and a Mac and PC desktop manager.

Mr. Unix Admin and Desktop Support for CSci

Each semester, the Computer Science faculty would provide me a list of students who needed accounts on the VAX 11/730. Then the VAX 11/785 arrived, and I thought we finally had a “real” machine.

One semester, the professors had provided me their lists of students as was expected, and I completed them swiftly. And although most of the professors were good friends and were a joy to work with, one professor became a little unreasonable.

An Irate Professor

I was working in my office with a lady who was helping me with some of the work and learning some of the technology. In walked that professor, and he asked, “How is it going? Did you get all the accounts set up?” And I had, so told him that I had.

A few hours later, he barged into my office red faced and livid. “You told me you had all the accounts assigned. Why did you LIE to me?” I paused and looked at him curious about what he was talking about.

“Don’t you look at me that way. You said you had all the accounts assigned and when the students in my class tried to log in, they did not have their accounts.”

And Who Were These Students???

I asked him whether he had given me his list of students as I had assumed he had no students needing accounts. After all, every one of the OTHER professors knew it was common sense to expect to inform me of any accounts they needed set up. And no other professor had any problems in the least understanding that. After all, whose brain was I supposed to read from which to draw this information?

The guy was being an ass. He gave me his list of students, and I had them, into the system in no time. The lady who was helping me had to constrain herself from wanting to rip the guy to shreds.

Turbo Pascal – Programming Made Easy

During my time at Fresno State, I helped students learn to program in Turbo Pascal. This was a funny kind of Pascal compiler that was a sort of easy to use programming environment.

At that time, many microcomputer programmers used a text editor called WordStar. We used WordStar for word processing as well as writing programs to be fed into a compiler.

So, what relevance does WordStar have with this Turbo Pascal compiler? Well, TurboPascal had a built in full screen editor that felt like this familiar WordStar editor, and native code Pascal compiler built into one program.

This was ideal for beginning programmers and ad-hoc computing as Turbo Pascal was as simple as an interpretive language. But it produced fast native code that ran directly on the CPU. Furthermore, it did not require breaking the program into modules, compiling them separately and linking them or separating them out into DLLs.

Tutoring and Mentoring Students in Programming Languages at Fresno State

Part of my job in the Computer Science, beside being a technical staff person, was to help tutor or mentor students in various languages–C, Pascal, COBOL, Fortran, Basic, Lisp, Prolog, Assembly, perhaps some others I don’t remember, and Unix administration.

Academic Conflict at Fresno State

Sadly, over time, I would learn of professors at Fresno State fighting over how to spend department money, whether to buy Sun workstations or Intel machines, and more. It was discouraging to see academic politics turning some of the people I loved and respected into abusive bullies and backstabbers.

I also learned that a man I had trained took credit for much of the work I did and claimed to have taught me everything I knew. Something that was laughable. When I left, he took over my position and many students complained of his intrusions into their private emails.

Other events made me uncomfortable with the political climate at Fresno State, though I still loved the friendships I had formed and was invited to return to speak to students after I had gone to work with NASA and Oracle. Overall, I continued to love Fresno State to this day. I also had a disappointment with the lack of integrity in Stanford’s ethics in that they would put off-campus students at a great disadvantage inflating the grades of on-campus students. And yet I never ceased to be humbled and grateful for all that I learned at both universities. My love for them runs deep as it does for Caltech.

Off to Consulting

I eventually said goodbye to my career at Fresno State (aka C.S.U., Fresno), and an Indonesian Computer Science student who had become one of my best friends, J.B. Masbrata and I started consulting together independently.

For a while, we built PCs and sold them. Some companies approached me with consulting jobs. For instance, a pension actuarial firm used my skills in math as I had considered becoming an actuary. Fresno State’s Agricultural Department contacted me to help set up their AT&T 3B15 and several of their AT&T workstations. And a small local phone company who had a dual operating system desktop running Unix and MS-DOS needed someone with Unix skills to get that computer set up properly.

Xenix, HVAC, and Soft Ceilings

Then I sold a Xenix based system with 4 terminals to an HVAC company with the HVAC business software. Ever put your foot through a ceiling? I did. When I was wiring in the terminals, I went into the gap between the ceiling and the roof careful to avoid stepping between the rafters. And then, “Whoosh!” my foot fell through, and good thing I didn’t fall through as well.

The secretary was walking right below me, and being startled, she let out with a string of profanities, and turned red as the CEO was a strong born-again Christian, and he heard her reaction. I think he was more upset about her profanities than my stupidity in letting my foot go through the ceiling. Actually, I think he was worried whether I was OK.

And then a contractor for NASA called, and I had to find a local Unix consulting company to take care of my customers before leaving for NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.