Daily Bulletin

Tuesday, May 13, 1997

Silver threads among the 40th

Canadian history lists 1972 as the year of the first Canada-Russia hockey series (and some of us remember the screams echoing through the Humanities building when Paul Henderson scored that final goal). For people who arrived at UW that year, though, there are other memories.

"I worked in the cataloguing department of the library," Marina Wan remembers, "and I thought the quality of the UW catalogue was much better than many. Many decisions and practices impressed me, one of them being the decision to convert catalogue records to machine-readable format, when we did not even have a system yet. When the time came, the data was there, and we were ready for the online catalogue."

She can hardly have guessed, though, that 25 years later she'd still be in the UW library -- and heading the Internet Resources Committee that manages the Electronic Library.

Remembering life in 1972

The kin department (and the faculty of "human kinetics and leisure studies", now applied health sciences) was scattered over half the campus then, and Thomson's first office was in the basement of Chemistry II. "I wasn't sure what I could contribute,"he says, " but was certain that I would continue learning. What was a five year trail in my mind, has stretched a bit longer."

Also among the 25-year veterans is Vic Neglia of the arts computing office, who came to UW as a student and stuck around to take a job:

The Faculty of Math was not in existence when I started so I enrolled in Science. I became fascinated by the computer and started spending every spare minute in the computer room, which was housed in the Physics building. A 1620 computer was available for anyone to use back then. You could actually get into the room and push its buttons unlike the IBM 740 which could only be accessed via placing your job in trays in the hallway.

I was hired as summer student by Wes Graham for three summers. As a result, I got to know and work closely with staff from DCS. Upon graduation, Arts was looking for a couple of programmers to work on a Victorian Periodical Database. Through my contacts in DCS, I was matched up with the job. As the story goes, I was only going to do this for a few years because I really wanted to go to teachers college. As you have noticed, 25, actually 26, years later I am still here. (I was on contract for my first year.)

ACO started as the HCARG (Humanities Computer Assisted Research Group), then became WATCHUM (WATerloo Computing in the HUManities), then under Jay Minas as Dean became the Arts Computing Office. We started out with offices in the MC building supplied by DCS. Shortly after we got offices (closets) in the HH building with a 2741 terminal -- probably the Faculty of Arts' major computer expense to date. ASCII terminals were becoming popular; we were probably one of the first groups to have an ASCII terminal outside the Math building. However, I didn't feel like I accomplished anything unless I had a punch card version of my program.

You needn't dial 1

"We abandoned the dial-1 requirement to make it less complicated to connect with incoming faxes to an extension," says Bruce Uttley of information systems and technology. Might make it just a little less complicated for human beings, too. If you do dial 1 before the extension number, it'll still work, for the time being, Uttley notes. "Perhaps some day we'll reuse dial-1 to enter an automated directory lookup package."

The voice that answers 888-4567 isn't "Ivy" of voicemail fame, by the way; it's the real Ginny Polai, the switchboard supervisor.

Today and tomorrow at Waterloo

• At 2:30, words from Ivan Sutherland, a vice-president of Sun Microsystems, appearing in the Celebrity Lecture Series sponsored by the computer science graduate student association. "Dr. Sutherland is one of the living legends of computer science and we are very proud that he agreed to visit us," writes Marzena Makuta of the CSGSA. His talk, "Concurrency Is Hard", begins at 2:30 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1302.
• Graduate student Todd Veldhuizen speaks at 5:30 on "Can C++ Be Faster than Fortran for Scientific Computing?" The very idea is heresy, I gather, but the local branch of the IEEE wants to hear what he has to say: "Sources of C++ performance problems, and language techniques which have been used to overcome them, will be briefly described." The event takes place in Davis Centre room 1302.

Finally, a reminder to co-op students: with exceptions in a few programs, work reports from the winter term are due at 4:30 today. ("Check with your faculty's undergraduate office for the correct deadline.")

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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