Cyber 750 word length

June 24 Trivia Question

Multiple choice: What was the architectural word length on the Cyber 750?
a. 8 bits
b. 16 bits
c. 32 bits
d. 64 bits
e. None of the above

General computer science trivia

June 22 Trivia Question

Who is credited with inventing the term “bug”?

June 19 Trivia Question

Who are the two people in the photo below?  What are they doing?

Celebration activities

How will we celebrate 40 years as a department? A tentative schedule is posted on the 40th anniversary Web site.

We are planning a keynote address, a panel discussion, and a history slide show for starters. You’ll have the chance to tour our labs and learn about our wonderful student groups.

The College of Engineering Homecoming Tailgate will be held on Saturday and it is always a good time. At the tailgate, you can enjoy fellowship, feast on a pre-game banquet, view student project displays, and meet the Dean of the College of Engineering. Please visit the CSE photo gallery to see pictures of previous tailgates.

We are still taking suggestions, though, so if you have any thoughts on the celebration, please let us know. Also, please add your stories to our online history archive. One thing that we feel is unique about our celebration is that everyone has the opportunity to participate. This is your history!

Whether you were here in 1968 or you are reading this down the hall in one of the 3rd floor labs, you are invited to share your own stories, photos, and insights into this place we have all called home.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Graduate program in computer science

June 17 Trivia Question

In what year did Michigan State University first offer graduate level courses in computer science?

Binary code

June 13 Trivia Question

Can you translate?

01101000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100011 01110011 01100101

Cyber 175/750

June 12 Trivia Question

Students who used the Cyber 175/750 timesharing system after the output room closed learned a “magic card” to put in their card deck to cause output to be printed on the self-service printer across the hall (open 24/7). What command was on the card?

Research labs

June 11 Trivia Question

What was the first research laboratory established in the computer science department at MSU?  What research laboratory was established in 2008?

CPS memories

Thank you to Roy Saper, who owns Saper Galleries and Custom Framing in East Lansing. Mr. Saper was kind enough to take time from his busy schedule to share memories of his time as a student at MSU.

How wonderful to learn of the 40th anniversary reunion in October. I will be there!

Next year will be my 40th year since beginning my CPS program at MSU in 1969. Of course I didn’t know much about computers before I selected the major as computers as we know them today did not yet exist.

I valued a friendship with professor Carl Page who asked me to help him with a CPS reunion not long before he died. I also remember enjoying classes with Richard Dubes, Richard Reid and (still-around) John Forsythe.

I suspect students today have no clue what it was like to have to key-punch our program cards and debug our code with once-a-day-turnarounds to find a missing character or typo.

One of my memorable experiences from senior year 1972-73 was when riding my bike on campus in the rain my box of 2,000 computer cards fell onto the wet street intersection and I saw months of work littered everywhere. The source code back then was not stored on disks and the cards were everything. Luckily I had recently made a back-up deck and was able to complete my compiler project in time to graduate with my computer science degree in 1973 — a few months after Larry Page was born and a couple years before Microsoft was created.

I believe there may have been about 2 or 3 women in my computer classes and most of us students spent hours each day on the second floor of the computer center working on our programs and submitting them for batch reading, returning the next day to retrieve our output. We dealt with a lot of theory in our classes but I don’t know of any of us that dreamed of the computing capabilities that we realize today.

And 40 years from now today’s students will probably have similar observations!

Thank you for putting together the reunion at homecoming! See you then!

Sincerely,
Roy C. Saper

CPS to CSE

June 10 Trivia Question

What year did the CPS department at Michigan State University change its name to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)?