1987 1990 Camp
Dr. Roger C. Camp was appointed chairman of the Computer Science Department for a three year term, effective Summer Quarter, 1987.
The appointment made by Dean of Engineering, Peter Y. Lee, was based upon the recommendation of the department faculty with the concurrence of President Warren Baker. Roger joined the Cal Poly faculty in 1984. He taught for 26 years at Iowa State University after earning his B.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering.
Roger Camp, Computer Science Department Chairman.
His industrial experience includes a year in systems marketing with Motorola and numerous consulting assignments that resulted in the design and development of a number of computer-based devices. Roger has written four textbooks.
Camp succeeds Dr. Daniel F. Stubbs who took over from Neil Webre and had led the department as an interim chair for a year.
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Editor’s Note: Roger once remarked to me that his legacy as the Csc Chairman will be the one who put windows in the classroom doors in building 14. If you thought they were always there, it means you came after Camp’s tenure. If you came before, you know the importance of those windows while walking in the narrow hallway of Building 14.]
President Warren J. Baker, Tandem Representative; Don Fowler, Roger Camp, and Alan Bell. Tandem donation for literacy laboratory.
What did the next three years of computer evolution bring?
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In 1987, Motorola unveiled the 68030 microprocessor. A step up from the 68020, it built on a 32-bit enhanced microprocessor with a central processing unit core, a data cache, an instruction cache, an enhanced bus controller, and a memory management unit in a single VLSI device – all operating at speeds of at least 20 MHz.
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Apple engineer William Atkinson designed HyperCard, a software tool that simplifies development of in-house applications. HyperCard differed from previous programs of its sort because Atkinson made it interactive rather than language-based and geared it toward the construction of user interfaces rather than the processing of data. In HyperCard, programmers built stacks with the concept of hypertext links between stacks of pages. Apple distributed the program free with Macintosh computers until 1992.
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IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with the PC.
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In 1988, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he created failed but was recognized as an important innovation. At a base price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular.
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Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit integer arithmetic and logic unit (the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction), a 64-bit, floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.
The X Window System (known as just X), first appeared in the mid 1980’s running on DEC VAX based Unix workstations. X was developed at MIT (with support from Digital) as part of MIT’s Project Athena distributed workstation environment. Many of the core ideas of X (as well as the X name) were derived from an earlier Stanford windowing system named W. Other ideas came from Sun’s SunView environment which ran on the 68000 based Sun-3 workstations. The early versions of X were developed primarily by Robert Scheifler, Ron Newman and Jim Gettys. X went on to become the basic graphics system of all the RISC based Unix workstations.
Aside from providing Unix with a graphical user interface, X’s main contribution to the computing world was the idea of displaying an application remotely over a network (ie: running an application on one machine but displaying its user interface on another, much like telnet already provided for command line Unix users). The implementation was a client-server approach, where an X window system server ran on the displaying machine, and the client programs communicated with it using a network protocol. The X server and its client programs could be running on the same machine, or on different machines, it didn’t matter.
X had an unusual career. In somewhat of an odd decision, its designers decided that X should only provide mechanism, not policy. So X did not provide any particular look and feel, but instead only provided the basic mechanisms on top of which several different user interface styles were later implemented.
As Roger started as Chairman, the Csc Department had 470 full time equivalent undergraduate majors, 60 graduate majors, and 350 full time equivalent computer literacy students. (service courses taught by Csc faculty) There were 28.2 full time equivalent faculty which translates to 38 people as some assignments are part time. The salaries of faculty and staff exceeded $1 million with an annual equipment budget of $40,000. The Computer Systems Laboratory had an inventory of $2.8 million, consisting of Pyramid 98XE, Tandem 6AX microcomputers, Sequent Balance, Sun Workstations, Xerox Workstations, AT&T Workstations, HP 64000 emulations systems, and many servers and printers.
Don Fowler of Tandem Computers and Roger Camp of Cal Poly made a commitment to improve the literacy laboratories at Cal Poly. To assist in this goal, Tandem presented Cal Poly with equipment for two new laboratories each containing 20 networked IBM PC-AT compatibles. This gift was made specifically to enhance the university service courses. The 40 workstations, each with two floppy disk drives and a hard drive were networked with two Unix-based file servers, located in the CSL, and print servers with laser printers. Network software, application packages and the hardware brought the cost of the Tandem donation to over $440,000.00.
Dean of the College of Engineering, Peter Y. Lee and Larry Voss, Assistant to President Warren J. Baker.
TRW Inc. awarded $4,000.00 to a Cal Poly computer science professor as the first of what is to be an annual Excellence in Teaching Award to a member of the University’s School of Engineering faculty. Dr. Laurian M. Chirica received a check, plaque and a certificate from TRW officials at a school faculty meeting. Also attending were Cal Poly President Warren J. Baker and Interim Dean of Engineering, Peter Y. Lee.
Chirica joined the faculty in 1984 and has taught a variety of courses, from an introduction to computer science to graduate courses in database management. He has several specializations and interests within the areas of database-management systems, programming languages, systems programming and computer science theory.
The following project by two Cal Poly Csc students, Darren Giles and Michael Morgan, was used by Apple CEO, John Sculley as reported in MacWeek, 29 Nov, 1988.
Nashville, Tenn. – CEO John Sculley and 21-year programming whiz Darren Giles teamed up here this week to demonstrate the latest step on the road to Knowledge Navigator: a HyperCard front end to a sophisticated executive information database that brings powerful information gathering abilities to college administrators who have minimal computing experience.
As part of his keynote address to CAUSE, a national education computing organization, Sculley showed new Mac software designed to retrieve information from the Executive Support System, a mainframe MIS database published by Information Associates of Rochester, N.Y.
The new Macintosh software uses a HyperCard point-and-click interface to allow managers to extract university management data and do sophisticated charting on institutional mainframes. The new Macintosh front end was developed as a joint effort by Information Associates, Apple and a student programming team at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Giles, a senior computer science student, led the Cal Poly group. According to Giles, Apple decided to showcase the program because it fits in with Sculley’s year-long plan to highlight what he calls `"enabling technologies,`" innovations that give information to people who wouldn’t otherwise have gotten it.
`"You could say this new front end is a step along the road to Knowledge Navigator,`" Giles said, referring to Apple’s year-old video which showed a future computer that melds hypermedia, large databases, global communications and simulations.
According to Giles, Executive Support System software has been a popular mainframe MIS system for several years, but the existing MS-DOS retrieval interface forced managers who needed the data to depend on researcher/programmers to access it.
In a five-month crash program, Cal Poly students, Giles, graduate student Michael Morgan, and Cal Poly faculty supervisor, Elmo Keller took the concepts behind the user-hostile MS-DOS command-line interface and transformed them into something significantly easier, `"with new features, practically a new program.`" The Mac version, Giles said, can be used by computer inexperienced administrators and other managers with just half an hour of training.
Ironically, development was slowed somewhat because of the quick success Giles and Morgan had in prototyping the program. Apple kept interrupting development to fly the developers to conferences to demonstrate its potential. Last month Giles demonstrated the program at EDUCOM, another educational consortium, and he will be on hand Dec. 1 to help Sculley during the keynote address.
`"It’s exciting when you write a program that makes a difference about what people can do, a normal person, not just someone who’s studied computers for 12 years,`" Giles said.
Giles has been programming longer than Sculley has been associated with computers. With instruction from his father, a math and computer programming professor at California’s Santa Rosa Junior College, he wrote his first program at the age of 12. `"Starting early has real advantages,`" he said. `"I pretty much think in code. People who pick it up later aren’t quite as fluent.`"
The main programmer on the project, Giles created a HyperCard user interface, which was altered often as new users tested the system. He and Morgan added external commands written in Pascal and custom macros built with Affinity Microsystems’ Tempo II that allow the front end to automatically chart data in Microsoft Excel and Cricket Graph.
DOS users wanting to extract data from the Executive Support System have to type in as many as 20 screens of arcane commands in a variety of complex programs, including dBASE III Plus, Lotus 1-2-3 and Harvard Graphics, according to Walter Mark, director of institutional studies at Cal Poly. `"If there was an error, all the time was wasted. I could see the university president doing that once and getting nothing and never using the system again. Anybody who sees the Mac version compared to the IBM wants it,`" he added, noting that several departments at the San Luis Obispo campus have recently adopted the Mac.
After Sculley’s demonstration, the Giles-Morgan program will be taken in house at Information Associates for quality control testing, then it will be made available to colleges and universities. An early prospect is the 19-campus California State University system, of which Cal Poly is a branch. Pricing for the program has not yet been established. It will run on any Mac Plus, SE or II with at least 2 Mbytes of memory.
The following faculty have joined the department during Roger’s tenure as Chairman.
Lois Brady, (1988), Ph.D., University of Wisconsin; James Etheredge, (1988-1991), Ph.D., Southwestern Louisiana; S. Ron Oliver, (1988-1997), Ph.D., Colorado State University; John B. Connely, (1970-2000), Csc, Ph.D, USC (Transfer from Education.); Clinton A. Staley, (1988), Csc, Ph.D, UCSB.
Warren J. Baker and representatives from TRW present Laurian Chirica with the Excellence in Teaching Award.
Left to right: Lois Brady, (1988) theory and core sequence; Ron Oliver, (1988) core sequence and networks.
Bob Dourson, who had 25 years in the computer industry before coming to the Csc Department, retired in the Spring of 1987 after 20 years at Cal Poly. Bob, who never met a programming problem he could not debug, was the official department “programming-problem solver.” He had an amazing talent to find problems in complex programs and would analyze anyone’s code – student, faculty, or computer center staff.