UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
Bill transferred to The University of Florida for Summer semester 1958 after receiving his Associate in Arts Degree from Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Florida. He enrolled in the UF Engineering Coop Program to help defray the costs of attending the university, and to gain experience in his chosen profession. His first co-op assignment was to IBM’s Federal Systems Division in Kingston, NY during the fall semester of 958. Bill’s experiences in New York are discussed at length below.
Here is a picture of Bill’s BEE degree that was awarded in February 1962.
CONVOCATION CEREMONY – FEBRUARY 1962
One of the highlights of my academic work at the University of Florida was the time time I spent in Senior Seminar. My instructor in this class was Professor Fagen. He was a slender, emaciated-looking man who had lost his health due radiation exposure on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago during World War 2. Fagen had worked directly with the United States scientists and engineers developing the Atomic Bomb we used to bring that war to its eventual end. He was a brilliant teacher and mentor I admired. He is one of personal heroes.
Here is my paper on The Systems Approach to Engineering Problem Solving.
And here is another paper I prepared for Professor W F Fagen’s Senior Seminar Course.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL COMPUTERS, 18 January 1961 for Senior Seminar EL-441.
MY COOP EXPERIENCE – IBM KINGSTON, NY
IBM650 BUSINESS COMPUTER
The rirst digital computer I ever wrote a program for was the IBM AN/FSQ-7 at the IBM plant in Kingston, NY. The second computer I wrote a program on was the IBM 650. The 650s replaced the old plug-board wired punched card were popular at universities for registering and keeping track of students. They were used in academics to teach comuter coding in the early days of commercial digital machines. FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was one of the first highter language assembly language translators. That is, you could write program code in terms a human could understand (like ADD, MOVE, SUB, SHIFT, etc.) rather strctly code with groups of ONES and ZEROES (the physical language the digital machine could understand). My class assignment was to write a program in thee FLATRAN (FLoridATRANslator) language. My program calculated the square root of a number to a specified decimal point position. It used a square root estimating algorithym that iteratively calculated an estimte of the square root. Each calculation was successively compared to the previous calculation until they matched to the desired decimal point. The you had the answer. GENIUS OR NOT? In the early days of the digital age, you had to tell the machine exactly what to do, correctly. If you told it wrong, the answer was WRONG.
The IBM 650 was a “small” machine in the fifties. It took a small room to house the computer and all its peripheral equipment (card punches, card readers, memory units, printers, tape handlers, etc. They were heat generators and temperature sensitive. The computer room had to air conditioned and humidity contrtolled
Here is what an IBM 650 computer room looked like.
A close up look at the operator console.
