Homework helper vs lecturer

Back around 1988 I was mostly working as a VAX mainframe sysadmin, at Griffin Coal Mining.

One of the geologists I knew was doing a 2-year post-graduate Masters to add computing skills. It was early days but Computational Geology was starting to become an important field.

It’s typical in early programming courses for a lecturer to give you a skeleton program as an assignment, to add some features.

This was well before most people had desktop computers — if you wanted to do some programming you’d go into the university and use a terminal in a dedicated “computer lab”. As a part-timer, working full-time, I’d spent many early morning hours out there doing that for my own degree.

The geologist had a bit of an advantage over most of his fellow students — he had a Unix “minicomputer” right there at work. Such a computer had multiple terminals connected to it, even some (gasp) graphical displays for drawing stuff beyond the 24x80 characters of standard terminals. We had massive digitising tablets for tracing maps, and a pen plotter for drawing them.

His problem was, the homework crashed.

I checked it over and the logic he’d added was plausible.

Then I took a closer look.

The assignment was in C, which I only knew about from my own Computer Science studies. At work, I used BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL.