Chapter 40: The Beginning of the End

Classes Start

March, 1979

On the first day of classes, I arrived early at the University; as well as my backpack and a box of papers, I had my acoustic guitar and my small practice amp. For that reason, I had decided to drive across to the campus; I gave Michelle a lift in the car with me so that she wouldn’t need to drive herself. She carried the box for me; and when we got to our rooms no one else had arrived yet. I started filing the papers away; these were my notes from last year’s Computer Networking class.

I hadn’t been working for all that long when Michelle stuck her head in the office, and asked if I would like a coffee.

“I tend to have the coffee maker going all day,” she said. “There’s a little bar fridge behind my desk; I know you like milk with yours. I normally bring a small Tupperware container of milk in every couple of days from home.”

A minute or two later, she came in, and put the coffee mug on my desk.

“Just how I know you like it, hot, strong and white,” she said, smirking at me.

“You’re going to spoil me, Michelle,” I said. “Thanks for coffee.”

“I could spoil you in some other ways, too,” she said. “Sorry, I forgot myself. Bad Michelle!” She smacked herself on her hand. “I promise I won’t do that again.”

“If you do, I will have to smack you myself,” I replied.

“Oh ... like you smacked Thornese? Yes please! My bum is tingling already just thinking about you doing that to me!”

She laughed as she ducked out of the office, and sat behind her desk. If she was going to tease me, then I would certainly tease her back. I was pretty confident we both knew where to draw the line with our behaviour. At least she made a great cup of coffee, I thought, as I blew across it to cool it down. Nice and strong, just how I liked it.

I had managed to put away all of the papers, and I had started reading some of the background material Alonzo had given me for the thesis when Trevor arrived.

“G’day Will, great that we are roomies for the year,” he said. “Having this office will make things so much easier. I tried not to take up too much space; I love the posters you’ve put up on the wall there, do you have any others? The wall on my side is pretty sad and bare.”

“Hey Trevor, how was the summer break? I’ve got more stuff at home, I can bring it in tomorrow. I didn’t want to take over the whole space. I agree with you, this beats trying to find a desk up in the library. Plus we’ve got our own dedicated terminals; no more fighting for time in the terminal lab.”

He saw my guitar next to my filing cabinet.

“Are you going to play and sing for your tutorial class, too?” he asked.

“No, I’ve got that here in case I need to take a break and try to get some inspiration,” I said. “I find that playing and singing to myself helps me concentrate at times. If I’m doing it at any time, and it’s bugging you, just tell me to shut up; there’s no problem with it. I don’t want to disturb you or interrupt your concentration.”

We compared our timetables; we both were doing the same computer science subjects, and giving tutorial classes at the same time. He was doing a different General Studies subject; he had managed to get into Cosmology; one subject that I had never been able to enrol in. We spent the next hour until we had to get to our hardware architecture lecture talking about our projects; the sorts of things that we intended to cover. It was good having him in the office with me; we could bounce ideas off each other.

Just before 10, we walked to the small lecture room up on the fourth floor where Doctor Dunlop would be running his class. He welcomed us; there were maybe fifteen others in the class; and we took our seats. He gave an outline of what the course would be covering; basically a study of various computer hardware architectures; an analysis of different architecture types; stack machines vs register machines; memory-mapped I/O vs port-mapped I/O vs channel processors. All in all, it looked like being an interesting subject. Alonzo was right; it shouldn’t add too much to my workload for the semester.

After that lecture, it was up to Alonzo’s conference room for the first Computer Networking meeting of the year. I saw them more as meetings, not as ‘lectures’. The class looked like it would be similar to last year’s one; Trevor and I were both in it; along with a new crop of graduate students; and some of the other computer science staff members.

After lunch, I sat down at my desk, and went through the design on the previous network simulation program, that Alonzo wanted me to use as the basis for my simulation tool. It was a good start, but I would have to redesign many of the network objects; if only because they weren’t designed for the TCP/IP protocols. I worked solidly through the afternoon, not stopping until Michelle knocked on the door.

“Will, how late did you intend staying?” she asked. “You know it’s five o’clock.”

“Oh, shit! Where did all the time go?” I replied. “Give me a minute or two; I’ll finish what I’m doing, and we can head back home.”

I had the bulk of the work on the class hierarchy done; I would only need a few minutes in the morning before my review meeting with Alonzo to get them in a form ready to present to him. I straightened up the papers that I had been working on; put things away in the desk, and went out to get Michelle, and together we walked back to my car, and drove home.

The next morning I got in by 7:30, updated my ‘thesis journal’ summarising everything I had worked on yesterday. I added a few comments to the diagrams I had drawn, and at eight, knocked on Alonzo’s office door. He told me that we would use the main conference room; so I collected my notes and diagrams, and set them out on the table.

“Okay, I see you’ve been fairly busy,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing, and we’ll take it from there.”

I started out by saying that I had reviewed the old program version, and documented the class library structure; making notes of where changes would be required for the new protocols and the various data link options. He nodded as I explained my reasons for breaking up some of the classes into subsets; and suggested a few more properties, particularly as they related to link speed, error rates, and utilization. He was very happy with my design; my next task was to finish the object model design, and start writing the Simula code. After lunch, I sat in on Paul Baker’s ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ lecture, mainly so I would be familiar with what he was saying to the students, so I could make sure I didn’t contradict anything he said in my tutorial sessions later in the week.

On Wednesday afternoon I prepared for the first tutorial session, just before four, I collected my notes and class list, and walked down the corridor to the terminal lab assigned to my class. There were meant to be twenty students in the class; I had made a copy of list, and would put notes on that to help me identify each student. Over the next few minutes, the classroom gradually filled, and when I felt everyone had arrived, I closed the door, and tapped on the desk at the front.

“Good afternoon everyone; my name is Will Morris, and I’m your tutor for subject 6.620 Introduction to Computer Science. If you’re not enrolled in this subject, then I guess you’re in the wrong place.”

I looked around; nobody got up to leave.

“First, let me tell you what the purpose of these tutorial sessions are. Given that this is probably your first week here at University, you may not be completely familiar with the differences between lectures, tutorials and lab sessions. The way we are running this subject – which, by the way, is the first year we’ve run this subject; we’ve redone the Computer Science curriculum and subjects from earlier years – the tutorial sessions are where we will be presenting material from the lectures in slightly greater detail; you will have the chance to work ‘hands on’ with one of the computer systems here. I’ll be here to help you with anything that you’re not quite sure about; or if you need something explained in greater detail that you don’t fully understand. Feel free to ask questions at any time.

“Let me give you a bit of background about myself; I’m a fourth year computer science student; I’m currently working on my honours thesis, which will deal with the simulation of complex data communications networks. In my results so far, I have achieved a distinction or better in all of my previous computer science subjects, so I think I know a little bit about the material we’ll be covering in this subject. I’m pretty much available to help you any time; my office is in Room 3-63B, that’s where the first year coordinator, Michelle Jones has her office. If you want to see me about something, you can check with her to see when I will be available. But I’m normally available most afternoons, just see Michelle to check if I’m free for you.

“Now, as you are probably aware, University isn’t like High School, we don’t take the roll for classes, if you don’t turn up, that’ll be your loss; it’s no skin off my nose. But, part of your overall assessment in this subject is what we’re calling a ‘tutorial participation mark’, which can account for up to ten percent of the total grade for this subject. In order to do that, I need to be able to know who each of you are, so when it’s time to allocate that mark, I can say, ‘oh, that guy was a lazy bludger who never did anything’, or ‘she was a disruptive trouble maker’, or ‘that person was really good, contributed a lot to the class, and helped others’. So, when I call out your name, just stick your hand up, or say something so I know who each of you are.”

I went through my class list calling out each name in turn, made a notation against each one; and indicated on a rough layout diagram on the room where each person was. With that done, I looked at the outline for this session, checked my watch, and started to write on the board.

“The next thing we will do is get you all signed into the computer here. You are all sitting in front of a computer terminal; turn it on ... and you will see the login prompt from the PDP 11-70 system. Accounts have already been set up for you, to sign in you need to enter your student ID number; that will be your user account name, and then your initial password, which will be your initials and last name. All lower case, no spaces.”

I showed them an example, what mine would be if my account was set up in the same way. I explained how that after each ‘interaction’ they needed to press the ‘Return’ key’.

“Imagine it’s like a two-way radio conversation, after each message, the operator speaking says ‘over’ to let the other operator know they have finished talking, and it’s now back to them to reply,” I said. “The way things work, each terminal is connected to the computer through a serial communications line; each key on the keyboard generates a particular character code as a string of bits, those bits travel over the comms line, and the main computer stores all of your keystrokes in an ‘input buffer’.”

I drew a diagram on the blackboard; showing a sequence of characters being sent to the computer.

“In actual fact, you are communicating with a program on the computer called the ‘shell’; it will receive the characters you’ve typed in, and when you press ‘Return’, it will interpret what you’ve typed in, and assuming it makes sense, will try to run that command, and send the results back to your terminal screen. What happens when you press a key, the computer will echo that back to you, so you can see it on the screen. Now, if you may a mistake, you can use the ‘backspace’ key to erase the immediately preceding character. Try that with entering your student ID as your login ... use the backspace key and see what happens.”

There was a furious tapping of keys as they all did that.

“Now, enter your password ... initials and last name. Notice something?”

“Yeah, the password doesn’t appear on the screen as we type it in,” one person said.

“Exactly; the shell recognises that you are typing a password, and doesn’t echo the characters back. The reason is that if some sneaky person is looking over your shoulder, they won’t be able to see your password. Otherwise, they could sign onto the computer as you, and do something nasty, like erase all of your files, or whatever. Has everyone signed in?”

I then spent the next few minutes going through some basic Unix commands, getting them to list the files in their directory, changing their password, changing directories and similar tasks.

“Now, the purpose of this subject isn’t for you to become an expert on the Unix system, but I’ve got a list of the most common commands that you’ll need to know. Take a copy, and pass the rest on.”

I distributed the sheets to the class.

“Now, let’s talk about file permissions ... type in the command ‘ls –lsa’, and we’ll talk about what we can see. Remember, Unix is what we call a ‘multi-user’ system, that means many people can use the computer at the same time – obviously, because all of you are signed into the system. But part of that means we need to be able to secure our files and directories, to prevent other people from deleting stuff, or even looking at things that we may not want them to see.”

I explained about the file ‘mode’; permissions for the owner, group and everyone, and how the binary digits can be represented as a decimal number. That lead into the next topic, binary to decimal conversions and back again. We worked through a number of examples on the board; once I had explained how each digit’s position represents a power of two (for binary) or ten (for decimal), most of them seemed to get the concept.

I noticed one of the students seemed to be very quick at getting the answer; I noticed he was using a calculator.

“Does your calculator have a binary capability, Mr. Roberts?” I asked.

“Yes, octal and hexadecimal as well,” he replied.

“You will find that very useful as you go through your degree,” I said. “However, at this stage, it’s important that you learn the underlying concepts behind the different number systems. The whole point of University, and our teaching, is not for you to get the right answer to any question; but to know why an answer is right, and the rationale behind it.

“Okay, that’s about the end of the session today; there’s an assignment that will be due for tomorrow’s session.”

There were groans from everyone in the class.

“It shouldn’t take you longer than ten or fifteen minutes; it’s just more of these exercises, conversions, addition, subtraction. You can use a calculator if you so wish, but for at least one question in each group, I would like to see all your work, just like we’ve done here. Don’t forget to put your name and student number on it before you hand it in, and I’ll see you all tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.”

As they left the room, the guy with the calculator, Graham Roberts, stopped to talk with me.

“I hope I didn’t do anything wrong using my calculator,” he said.

“No, there’s no rules against using pocket calculators in this subject,” I said. “My main concern is that by using it to do all the work for you, you may not get a good understanding on what is going on behind the scene, as it were. Just the same as knowing how to do long multiplication and division, rather than letting the calculator do all the work for you. After a while, you’ll get to the stage when you can do those conversions in your head, it will be that automatic for you. What I want to make sure is that you understand what’s really going on with these different numbering systems.”

“Okay, that makes sense. I’ll do all of the assignment questions by hand,” he said.

I went back to my office, and wrote up a page and a half of notes from the session. I made a note to talk with Paul about the use of calculators that could perform arithmetic operations in other bases. I put my notes away, and drove home with Michelle. At the next day’s tutorial session; I was pleased to see all twenty students had returned, and all of them handed in their assignments from the previous day. I would spend Friday morning grading them.

“Okay, now you’re probably all completely sick and tired of binary to decimal conversions, and eager to move on to something new. And we will ... binary multiplication! Now, in your assignment, you had adding and subtracting two binary numbers; now we will look at multiplying two numbers. As we did yesterday, let’s go back to how we all learned some basic arithmetic back in primary school. If you had to multiple, say six hundred and sixty-nine by four hundred and seven, how would you do it? Let’s work it out longhand on the board.”

I wrote the operations out on the board, showing how we would first multiply 669 by 7, then because the next digit in the multiplier was zero, we skip that one, and for the multiplier digit 4, we shift things by two places to the left, and do the multiplication by four. Everyone understood that process.

“Now, let’s try twelve by two,” I said. “Now, we know the answer will be twenty four, but let’s do it in binary. What’s decimal twelve in binary?”

“One one zero zero,” someone called out, and I wrote that on the board.

“And two?”

“One zero”.

We worked through that in a similar manner, getting the answer we expected.

“Now, did anyone notice anything interesting about what we did?”

“The bit pattern is shifted one place to the left?” one of the women suggested.

“Exactly. Multiplying by two means shifting one place to the left. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, if we were working in decimal, what does multiplying be ten do? Exactly the same, shifts the digits one place to the left. And the reverse applies; dividing by two means shifting the bits one place to the right.”

We did some exercises practicing with some more examples. Once I felt everyone was confident with this concept, I moved on to the next part of the session.

“Now, we’ve probably done binary arithmetic to death, at least for the moment. Let’s talk about computer programming; and how we go about designing and writing programs. The first thing to remember in looking at any potential computer program; the role of a computer program is to solve a particular problem. Inside any complicated problem are a bunch of simple problems all trying to get out of it. Probably the most useful skill for a good programmer to develop is learning how to break a single, complicated problem into a sequence of simpler problems.

“Now, let’s talk about how we go through the design process. Some people like to use flowcharts, or some other diagramming process; I personally use what I call ‘pseudo code’, where I will use English-like statements that express the logic. For example, let’s pick something that will be dear to all your hearts; we need to total each person’s marks across all the assessable parts of this subject, calculate their combined mark and grade, and also the average total mark for the subject.”

Over the next thirty minutes, we defined the program, first at a very high level, then progressively refining each part of the program. At no stage did I try to write in any particular programming language, keeping it all at the pseudo-code level.

“This is what we call ‘stepwise refinement’,” I said. “If you start with something as generic as ‘Calculate student’s total mark’ and ‘Determine grade level’, then it’s easy to translate that into some actual syntactically correct programming language, once you have the high level logic worked out. Now, you might want to keep a copy of that design; I think the second programming assignment you will get will be to solve a problem almost identical to that one.”

That pretty much finished the day’s session; I handed out another assignment, this one with more binary arithmetic problems on it. Friday morning, before my first lecture I marked all of the assignments that had been handed in the previous afternoon; I was pleased to see that everyone got full marks. I ran off copies of each paper, filed the copies in each student’s file drawer, and put the original papers in my own cabinet, so I could return them in the next tutorial session. After lunch, while I was working on writing the code for the network class libraries, Paul Baker knocked on my office door.

“G’day Will, how’s things going?” he asked. “Got a minute?”

I told him to grab a seat, and I joined him around the coffee table.

“So, how has it been going running the tutorials?”

I told him how things were good so far; that everyone got full marks in the first assignment; the issue with the calculator for solving binary arithmetic problems, and how I had addressed that.

“That was probably the best approach,” he said. “There’s no way we can stop people using them, but as long as we stress they understand what they’re doing. What are the students like, any potential problems?”

“No, they all seem to grasp things; several of the women are a bit quiet; two Indian ladies, and one Chinese; although I think that might be a cultural issue with them not wanting to speak up while there are males around. But they seem to understand things pretty well; everyone got full marks for the first assignment on binary arithmetic.”

“At the end of this morning’s lecture, I asked the class if anyone had any concerns or comments about their tutors; several of your students spoke highly of you; they said you explained things clearly, and made the sessions enjoyable. That’s what I like to hear; you must be doing a good job. How’s things going, generally? Making progress on your thesis? It sounds like a really interesting project; I’d love to see it once you get the program going.”

“It’s all good, so far; Doctor Dunworth’s Hardware Architecture subject is turning out to be interesting; and, yeah, the thesis work is progressing.”

“Cool; well, I just thought I’d drop in and see how things were after your first week with the tutorials. Don’t forget, you can see me anytime you think there are problems, or if you have questions.”

After he left, Michelle came into the office.

“What time were you thinking of leaving today?” she asked.

“I reckon just about now,” I said. “I think I’ve done more than enough here this week, and I need to get ready for Crystal. Are you and Greg coming tonight? Coming to see us play, I mean...”

“I was going to reply ‘I certainly hope so’ ... but yeah, we will come to Crystal tonight,” she said. “You’re being a bit forward, wanting to know if I might be getting off tonight; I could ask if you would like to experience that first hand, but, I know I shouldn’t ask you that.”

“Be careful what you ask for, Michelle, one of these days, I will take you up on that.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Will Morris,” she said. “Now, let’s be like shepherds, and get the flock outta here!”

When we got back home, Lori pulled me to one side.

“I think you really need to talk with Megan,” she said. “She’s really down, missing Tracy, and she’s talking about not going to Crystal tonight, saying she really doesn’t feel up to playing.”

“Okay, I’ll talk with her. Where is she, up in the studio?” I replied. “How are you holding up, by the way?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I miss her, but that’s okay, I’ve got you, and Megan.”

I headed up to the Studio, to find Megan sitting on a chair, absent-mindedly playing her guitar. Her eyes looked red, as if she had been crying.

“You want to go for a walk, and talk about things?” I asked her. No point trying to beat around the bush.

We headed out to the street; she put her arm around my waist, and I put an arm around her shoulders. We walked down towards King Street; we had gone about half a block in silence.

“Okay, talk. What’s the problem that has you so upset?” I asked her.

“Isn’t it obvious? Don’t tell me you don’t miss her? I just can’t really do things without her around anymore, my heart’s just not in it. I’m empty inside.”

“I miss her too,” I said. “Now, I can’t say that how I’m feeling is anything like the same as you’re feeling. And the way I deal with loss works for me, sort of; but may be of no help to you at all.”

She didn’t say anything, so I continued.

“I’ve had quite a few occasions when I’ve had to cope with partners leaving me; sometimes I didn’t handle it well at all, not in the beginning. But there’s been Cathy Parsons, twice, Hannah when she and Jenny DeJong left for Europe, Ros, Tracy, and even you.”

“Me? When?”

“Don’t you remember back in around May of 1976? When you decided to drop me for Bruce?”

“Oh, yeah, I had forgotten about that. But we ended up back together a few months later.”

“Sure, but when you dumped me, it was right before Cathy officially dumped me again,” I said. “But that’s not the main point I’m trying to talk about here; I guess over the last few years, I’ve worked out a way to handle things when someone I love leaves me. I’m not saying it’s the right way for you, or is the best way to handle something like that.

“Let me try to give an example, an illustration. Now, you know sometimes when you’re on a train leaving Central, and there’s all those parallel tracks, you can look out of the window, and there’s another train right next to you, and you can see someone there through the window, almost sitting next to you in the other train?”

She nodded her head.

“They might be travelling right next to you for any length of time; maybe ten seconds to a minute or two; then their track diverges, or one train stops, or whatever. And you know you’ll never see that person again. That’s how it is with some people in our lives; they come along, travel with us for a while, then circumstances pulls them away. My view is to enjoy their company while they are here, and make sure there are lots of nice memories to look back on once they aren’t around. Like Ros, for example; she and I had some great times together, some very special times ... but now she’s married to Alonzo, she’s now part of his life, and our relationship has changed to being just friends.”

“And not ‘friends with benefits’? Megan added, smiling.

I felt that if she could make a joke, even a weak one like that, she was getting better.

“Exactly. But I can still look back, and remember some of the nights Ros and I spent together, they were really lovely. It’s the same with Tracy; our meeting was pure chance; had Lori and I not gone on that ‘murder mystery weekend’, or if she had written some of the characters differently...”

“And she and I would never have met,” Megan said. “But we did meet, and we fell in love. Now she’s gone, and I miss her so much. Not just the sex, the physical side of things; if I need that, I have you or Lori; and that’s more than satisfying. But the companionship; having someone at the end of the day to sit and talk with, to share things with.”

“Let me tell you some of the things that Tracy and I talked about, when we went up to Kim’s. I asked her if she would consider in the long term, assuming she came back to Sydney at some stage, whether she would like to move back in with the three of us. I wanted to know if she would want our ‘foursome’ arrangement to continue long term. She reacted as if I was asking her ‘is the sky blue’; she said of course she would love to be living with the rest of us on a long term, permanent basis. She even raised the issue of her wanting to have kids at some stage, and asking if that would be an issue with you and / or Lori.”

“Really? She actually said that, about kids?” Megan replied. “That’s something we’ve never really talked about, long term, what if Lori and I want to have kids ourselves? I wonder how that would work; the four of us; plus a bunch of kids, all in the one house. If Tracy was actually prepared to talk with you about that ... maybe she’ll only be gone for a year or two. That’s not as bad as I thought.”

“Considering that all of us have only turned twenty-one; there’s quite a while before we’re all ready to start talking about having a family or anything like that,” I said. “At least we’re not ruling anything out for the future. I guess we just need to keep all of our options open; and see what happens. I mean, who knows what might happen next year with any of us, but at the moment, let’s assume that at some stage in the future, there will be all four of us living together as one large family.”

“Thinking that way does make me feel better,” she said. “Although, I guess there’s always the chance that she’ll meet someone special down in Melbourne. I don’t know how I could handle that.”

“I guess that’s always on the cards, but that could happen with any of us,” I said. “Sure, with her being away from us in Melbourne, it might be more likely than any of us finding our ‘one true love’; but as we’ve seen, anything can happen. I mean, look at Ros and Alonzo, and Wendy and Patrick – both sets of couples fell in love straight out of the blue. And we don’t know for sure what each of us here will do next year, once we’ve finished our degrees. I mean, I’m hoping to stay on at University, get a research scholarship, and do my PhD, but that’s not guaranteed. There’s no way we can make solid plans for what we will end up doing four or five years in the future, I mean we all have a general direction of where we would like to end up, and each day, we make decisions that take us in that general direction, but, we can’t be sure that long term that’s where we will be. None of us can accurately predict the future.”