Part 16 — A New Life Awaits
Friday, August 4, 1972
The presentations were being given in alphabetical order, based on the presenter’s last name. Lindsey was in the middle of the alphabet, and as luck would have it, I was scheduled for the first presentation of the morning on this, the final day of the program. Going through the cafeteria line, I took a full assortment of breakfast items. They were serving omelets, and I took a two-egg western omelet with hash browns, two strips of bacon and two sausage links. As always, I took a cup of hot water and an Earl Grey teabag.
As I started to eat, I began to wonder if I should have taken a bowl of oatmeal instead of everything else except the tea. I was nervous as hell and my stomach was doing flip-flops. The sausage in particular didn’t sit well in my stomach, so I left most of it on my plate, along with the bacon. I just wasn’t all that hungry and the hash browns were more than enough to fill me up.
My nervousness only grew as we finished our breakfasts and headed over to Schaeffer Hall for the last time. Since I was to be the first speaker, I went up to the podium and checked to be sure that everything was there. I checked that the overhead projector was working and retrieved my transparencies, placing them, in order, on the adjoining table. Then I took my seat.
I’d practiced my talk at least a dozen times — first by myself and then with Paul making suggestions on the content and my delivery. Having not been involved in any way in my research, he brought a fresh perspective, and I ended up switching the order of some of the transparencies, based on his critique. I no longer needed to rely on notecards, although I’d made some as a backup, just in case.
At the start of the hour, Professor Ratcliffe got up to make some general announcements. Then he reminded us of the dinner that night. “Dinner will begin promptly at 7:00 in the River Room Café at the Iowa Memorial Union. Dress is what is often referred to as business casual. That’s a dress shirt and slacks for boys and a blouse and medium-length skirt for girls. Leather shoes, but not sneakers, are preferred. Dinner jackets, sweaters and ties are appropriate but optional. I’ll see you there.”
Cool. I didn’t know I was already wearing business casual clothes, with a button-up shirt, a tie, flared dress slacks and leather dress shoes. I could just wear what I was already wearing.
“Getting on with our research presentations, our next speaker is Jeffrey Lindsey, a rising junior at North Central High School in Indianapolis. Jeff is a participant in an advanced college physics program for junior and senior high school students, at Butler University. He’s taking accelerated Trigonometry, Biology, American Literature and U.S. History next year. He intends to complete the requirements for graduation at the end of next summer and will be applying for university matriculation for the fall semester of 1973.
“Jeff has been working with Professor Ellis in the Department of Electrical Engineering, in the College of Engineering. His research project is titled, “Is the writing and application of computer programs to the solution of simple problems practical for a high school student?”
Getting up from my seat and walking to the lectern, I felt strangely calm. I knew I should be nervous, and although I could feel my heartbeat, I felt in control. These were my peers. I’d done my best and I knew what I was talking about as well as anyone on the planet. I began my presentation:
Good morning,
The interest in using machines to perform complicated calculations is nothing new. The earliest use of the abacus occurred in ancient Samaria, between 2700 and 2300 BC. Other devices for computation have existed since ancient times, such as the astrolabe for navigation. In 1493, Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for a mechanical device with cogs and wheels that might have served as a precursor to the adding machine, had it been built.
The slide rule was devised in or around 1620 by Edmund Gunter at Oxford University and simultaneously by others. Based on John Napier’s concept of the logarithm, it allowed for the rapid multiplication and division of numbers. With the later addition of scales for calculations of logarithms and trigonometric functions, the slide rule has been a staple of engineering and science to this day, but that’s changing.
The slide rule is an analog computer — a computation device based on a mechanical mechanism. It’s a pocketable scientific calculator, and it costs a lot less than the HP35.
I paused while everyone laughed, and then continued.
However, with the advent of electronic potentiometers, vacuum tubes and meters, the first truly programmable electronic analog computers became possible. Project Typhoon, developed by RCA in 1952, employed 4000 vacuum tubes, 100 potentiometers and 6000 electronic connectors, but it couldn’t match even the most basic adding machine when it came to accuracy.
The first truly digital computer, based on Boolean logic, was conceived of by Charles Babbage in the early nineteenth century. Babbage, considered the father of digital computing, developed the concept for an ‘analytical engine’ that included all of the elements of a modern digital computer, but using mechanical actuators and powered by a steam engine. It even was programmed using punched cards. It had already cost nearly a half-million in today’s dollars by 1842, when funding was terminated. A less-complex tabulating machine, based on Babbage’s difference engine, was completed in Pehr Scheutz in 1853.
Realizing that I was spending too much time on the background without getting to the meat of my project, I decided to gloss over the remaining details and continued:
Without getting into too much more of a history lesson, the first electronic computation machines, which used electromagnetic relays, were built in the early twentieth century. IBM and Bell Labs both invested heavily in the technology, with IBM developing the standardized 80-column punched card we use today. However, it was right here in Iowa, at Iowa State, that the first electronic calculator was built in 1939. It used vacuum tubes rather than relays.
Of course the Second World War kicked computer development into high gear, with the vacuum tube-based ENIAC computer being introduced in 1946. It weighed 30 tons and consumed 160 kilowatts of power. It wasn’t until Bell Labs invented the transistor that widespread use of computers in academic and corporate environments became possible. The IBM 360 family of computers, introduced in 1964, was the first to be designed for both commercial and scientific applications.
Placing my first transparency on the overhead projector and turning it on, I proceeded to explain the architecture of modern digital computers, with a central processing unit, random access memory, which in the IBM 360 consisted of a magnetic core array, a series of input devices that included teletypes, terminals and card readers, storage units consisting of hard disk drives and magnetic tapes, and output devices such as line printers.
Next, I went into a discussion of computer languages and how every computer has its own machine language consisting of binary codes for each possible operation, and how something as simple as addition required at least three steps — to move the first number into a register, to add the second number to the register and to return the result back to memory. I spoke about assembler programs that translated English language instructions directly into machine language. I spoke of the use for higher-level computer languages such as Fortran and Cobol, that served as a universal basis for writing machine-independent code, and how each computer used a compiler to convert that code into machine language.
I decided to skip the material I’d prepared on time sharing and operating systems, as they weren’t relevant to my project, and went directly into explaining the concept of an algorithm and the use of subroutines, which could be called within a computer program, versus macros, which merely substituted commonly-used bits of code without having to reenter them each time. I followed that with a description of the process for writing a computer program in Fortran, punching it on cards, one instruction at a time, and submitting a program to have it run.
I’d already spent half of the ten minutes just going over the background information for my project, so it was high time to get into talking about the project itself:
Based on the concept that computers provide an efficient means of performing complex, repetitive calculations, I hypothesized that the IBM 360 could be used as a practical means for a high school student such as myself to solve simple mathematical problems. Inherent in the hypothesis is the premise that the computer will save time over simply doing the calculations by hand or searching for the results in the literature.
Because this project was completed while I was in the process of learning how to use computers and how to program in Fortran, I didn’t account for the time spent actually writing the programs. Instead, I’ve focused solely on the time required to get each computer program to work. Since the turnaround time for computation varied with the time of day and the day of the week, I used the total number of program submissions required to complete a problem as the sole metric for gauging efficiency or the lack there of. The actual time can be inferred by multiplying by the average turnaround time of 59 minutes.
Placing a listing of the problems provided for me to solve by Dr. Ellis, I went on:
Here is a list of a series of mathematical problems a student might encounter that in theory are solvable by computer. As you see, the ten problems on the list are progressively more difficult, starting with the calculation of the values of π and of e, the base of natural logarithms, to one hundred decimal places. Not that I’d want to calculate those by hand, but entire books are available that list those important constants to far more decimal places than one hundred.
Indeed, I used the book values to verify the accuracy of the computed results. The challenge from a programming standpoint was that one can’t use built-in floating point math! The computations, using semi-infinite series, are simple, but figuring out how to manage such large numbers of digits was another matter.
Placing the next transparency on the projector, I continued:
Here are the results — π and e to one hundred decimal places. This was the first computer program I’d ever written and there were some initial hiccups before I figured out how to get any program to compile and how to get the results to print. I didn’t start counting submissions until I’d gotten past the hiccup stage. It took me eight submissions to correctly calculate and print π, and three for e, for a total of eleven submissions, which amounted to ten hours and 49 minutes. Walking to the library, finding appropriate books and looking the associated numbers took less than an hour.
I went through a similar discussion for each of the other nine programs, but in much less detail for all except the plotting algorithm and the Fourier program. As the end of my allotted time was rapidly approaching, I didn’t have time to discuss them in as much detail as I’d planned, but the gist of the project was to quantify success in using the computer — not teach my audience about mathematic algorithms. Obviously, I shouldn’t have spent so much time on the history of computers.
So in conclusion, it was demonstrated that a computer offered no advantage in terms of ease of use, accuracy or efficiency. A student could find solutions to these problems in the literature or could calculate answers by hand in far less time. The answer then to, ‘Is the writing and application of computer programs to the solution of simple problems practical for a high school student?’ is definitely no. Thank you.
The buzzer sounded just as I said, “Thank you,” so I’d cut it a bit closer than I’d have liked. I had planned to go into more of a discussion of how the results might have differed with a different programming language or with online submissions, but I didn’t have the time. Fortunately, Dr. Ratcliffe asked me that very question. I answered:
Although I could speculate about the inherent advantages of a structured programming language such as Algol or Bell Labs’ C, without experience in anything other than Fortran, that would amount to pure speculation. Clearly, online program submission and realtime execution would make a huge difference, but the time and effort in writing the computer programs then couldn’t be so easily ignored. The evaluation of other computer programming languages is beyond the scope of my research. Future studies are planned.
I took a few more questions from my fellow students before taking my seat. As I did so, I saw Dr. Ellis standing in the back of the room. He smiled and nodded at me and then left. I wondered when he’d snuck in.
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Although I could have gone directly from the research presentations to the farewell dinner, the last of the presentations finished at 4:30 and with concluding remarks from Dr. Ratcliffe, we were dismissed not long after that. With time to kill, Paul, my friends and I headed back across the river to what was now Slater Hall. It was a shame that Larry was no longer with us but he’d made his choice.
As we headed across the Burlington Bridge, Steve pointed out that our student ID cards didn’t expire until Monday. “That means our meals are still covered through the weekend,” he continued, “and that includes tonight.”
“Wait a minute,” Greg asked. “Are you suggesting we eat dinner now, and then again tonight at the farewell dinner?”
“Not a full meal, but a snack sure would be nice,” Steve went on. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. By the time they get around to feeding us, it’ll be another three hours at least and I don’t wanna hafta wait that long.”
“I suspect the farewell dinner supplants our dinner in the Quad,” I pointed out.
“How would the cafeteria staff even know?” Kyle asked.
“Good point,” Brandon chimed in. “What’s the harm in trying?”
So we dropped off our things in our rooms and headed through the underground passage to the Quad cafeteria. Sure enough, we had no difficulty getting in. I only intended to grab a salad or a small sandwich, but they were serving coq au vin, which was one of the best things they made. Of course I ended up with a full dinner. So’d everyone else.
Taking our seats, Kyle said, “I’m sure glad that’s over with.”
“Going through the cafeteria line?” Paul asked with a bemused expression on his face.
“No, doofus, I meant giving my presentation,” Kyle clarified.
“Definitely”, I agreed.
“How’d you get such professional-looking transparencies, Jeff?” Brandon asked. “Everyone else’s were drawn by hand.”
“I have to thank one of the secretaries in the electrical engineering departmental office for that. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know her name though. She showed me how to load transparency film into the copier and to copy my pages from paper onto the transparencies.”
“I wish I’d known about that,” Kyle added.
I went on to explain, “Most of the time, when one presents at a scientific meeting, all illustrations are submitted on 35mm slides. They hafta be loaded into Kodak slide carousels in advance and handed to the projectionist, who loads them onto the projector at the start of each talk.
“It’s not uncommon to spend over a hundred dollars having professional photographers and illustrators prepare the slides for a five-minute presentation. However, most scientists build up their own slide libraries for use in their presentations, saving the cost of having all new slides prepared each time.”
When everyone else just stared at me as if I’d grown an extra eye, I explained, “Professor Dixon at Butler University told me about that. He teaches advanced physics to a bunch of us junior and senior high students on Saturdays.”
“You did an amazing job with your transparencies,” Steve exclaimed.
“Thanks.”
“I noticed you didn’t use any notecards,” Gary asked. “How’d you remember all those details about who did what and when?”
Shrugging my shoulders, I answered, “It’s not like I did anything special other than practice a lot. I did have notecards in my pocket, though, just in case.”
Fortunately, talk turned to less personal topics, such as the baseball season, in which I had no interest, and the upcoming presidential election. Before we knew it, it was time for us to change clothes if desired and head to our second dinner of the evening.
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The River View Café provided a pleasant setting for the farewell dinner. Contrary to what Dr. Ratcliffe had said, dinner did not start promptly at 7:00, so I was grateful to Steve for suggesting we get a snack at the Quad. Instead, there was an open bar with only soft drinks available, as well as a small buffet with hors d’ oeuvres that were quickly devoured by those who hadn’t eaten something first.
Apparently, we were supposed to mingle while waiting to sit for dinner. However, mingling wasn’t something teens did. It’s one of the reasons school dances are so awkward. Most of us have our own group of friends, and those that don’t are either too shy or antisocial to mingle. I knew that as adults, we’d need to learn to at least tolerate mingling, but we weren’t ready for that yet. How quickly adults forget what it’s like to be a teenager!
However, during our mingle time, I was approached by a young man I didn’t know. He looked like he might be a graduate student or perhaps a young faculty member, but I’d never seen him before. “Jeff? I’m Berry Carlson,” he began as he peeled me away from my friends. “I’m a fellow Hoosier and like you, I attended physics sessions at Butler with Marshall Dixon. I graduated from Broad Ripple High School in 1966, so I’m eight years older than you, I think.
“I went to Butler for my undergrad, and then I came here to work under James Van Allen for my PhD. I hope to finish by next spring, and then do a post doc at Stanford, Berkeley or Cal Tech in one of the labs doing work in quantum cosmology. MIT and Cornell are also possibilities, but I’d rather live in California after spending my life in the boring Midwest,” he added with a laugh.
“The reason I approached you,” he continued, “is because I think we have a lot in common, and because I was intrigued by how much you accomplished here in just six weeks.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, incredulous at the suggestion that I’d accomplished anything. “I failed. It would’ve taken me less time to solve all those problems by hand.”
“But that was never the point,” he countered. “You picked up invaluable skills that will help you breeze through your assignments in college. Yes, it took you more time than it was worth, but the Fourier program was more typical of an end-of-year assignment. In spite of the number of times it took you to iron out the kinks in your program, you aced it. Not only that, but you went the extra step to get your graphs to print horizontally instead of vertically. Most students are satisfied to get away with doing the least amount of work necessary.
“I think you’ll find things are a lot easier in college, particularly when you get to graduate school and can ask the undergrads to punch your cards and run your programs for you. Better still, you’ll probably be using much better computers by then. The IBM 360 is a dinosaur. The problem with mainframes in general is that they’re so big and they cost so much money that a university can’t afford to replace them, yet the technology is already outdated by the time they’re installed!
“Companies like DEC are trying to change that. They’re making slimmed-down mini-computers using integrated circuits instead of discrete components. With computers that don’t take up an entire room, installation costs are a fraction of those of the 360, as is power consumption. And with a modular design, upgrades are easy. Soon, I think, every department will have its own mini-computer and mainframes will be relegated to specialized applications like managing payrolls in large corporations.”
I responded, “Dr. Ellis thinks that within a decade, a computer will be small enough to fit on a desktop.”
“With microprocessors built on a single integrated circuit, that’s a virtual certainty,” Berry replied, “and that’s just the beginning. With further miniaturization, you’ll see portable computers about the size of a spiral notebook, and they’ll be orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than the IBM 360 is today.
“You mentioned the HP35 in your talk,” he continued. “As you might be aware, HP already has designed a successor, the HP45, with twice as many functions and ten addressable memories for storage, and it’ll be the same price. What you might not know is that they’re also working on a programmable model, the HP65, with a 100-step capacity and the ability to store programs on a magnetic card that slips into the side of the unit.”
“That sounds incredible,” I replied.
“So’s the price,” Berry responded. “It’ll reportedly retail for $795.”
“Ouch!” I exclaimed. “That’s way above my pay grade.”
Laughing, he said, “Mine too, but I’m sure it’ll find a niche market for those who can afford it. Eventually, the price will come down and the capabilities will expand. I’m sure that some day, an entire computer will fit in your pocket — maybe even on your wrist like in Dick Tracey.”
“That would be so cool,” I chimed in.
“You could be a part of that,” Berry said.
After a pause, I replied, “I’m not sure I want to be a part of that. Not in designing computers and writing programs, anyway. If nothing else, the last six weeks showed me that computer science isn’t really my thing. Oh, I’m really looking forward to making use of the newer computers you talked about, but as tools for my work rather than as the focus of it.”
“What do you want to do?” He asked.
“That’s a good question,” I answered with a laugh. “I’m still trying to figure that out, but after hearing Dr. Van Allen’s talk, I’m leaning heavily toward astrophysics. I’m intrigued by the term ‘quantum cosmology’ that you used a few minutes ago. Could you explain it to me?”
That opened up a lengthy discussion that lasted the rest of the night. I didn’t intentionally shun my friends, but I sat next to Berry during dinner and couldn’t recall the person on the other side of me if I were paid to give an answer.
By the time I walked back to Slater Hall with my friends, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
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“What were you and Berry talking about at dinner,” Paul asked when we got back to our room.
“You know him?” I asked.
“I’ve met him, but I wouldn’t say I know him,” Paul replied. “He’s one of Dr. Van Allen’s graduate students.”
“He’s pretty nice,” I continued, “He went to the same physics program at Butler that I do. I guess I can overlook the fact that he went to one of my high school’s chief rivals.”
“So what did you talk about?” Paul asked again.
“We talked about my future,” I explained. “I hadn’t known there was such a thing as quantum cosmology before. It’s a perfect fit for the kinds of things I enjoy doing. I’m good at advanced math and quantum mechanics is at the core of theoretical physics. Yet we still haven’t figured out how to reconcile quantum theory with Einstein’s general and special relativity, let alone gain a comprehensive view of the universe. Time itself is one big question mark. It didn’t even exist at the moment of the Big Bang and it ceases to exist at the center of a black hole.
“Actually, the very nature of a black hole is undefined. Matter and energy fall into a black hole under the crushing force of its gravity and yet time for them slows down as they approach the center, to the point that it virtually stops, and they never actually reach the center. But in that environment, the force of gravity is enough to overcome the atomic forces of ordinary matter and even the quarks themselves should cease to exist as independent entities. Quantum theory doesn’t apply, but if not, what does?”
“Good Lord, that’s way too theoretical for me,” Paul responded. “More power to you, but I’m more interested in traditional astrophysics — space exploration, the search for exoplanets and extraterrestrial life — that sort of thing. Iowa’s perfectly suited to my interests, but perhaps not yours, even with Van Allen at the helm. Of course your undergraduate institution’s not that important, but you should try to go to grad school at a place like Stanford.”
“That’s kind of what Berry and I were discussing. Naturally, it would be better if I could get into a place like Stanford, Cal Tech, Berkley, Cornell or MIT — not that I can afford any of those. Iowa would be cheaper, but not by that much. At least you have the advantage of paying in-state tuition,” I noted. “I don’t.”
“You might be better off living at home and going to Butler,” Paul suggested.
“That’s kind of what I’m thinking, but who knows? Perhaps I’ll get a scholarship to one of the other schools. Good luck with that! It’s not like I have straight A’s. Gym pretty much made that a non-starter. I’m in the top percentile, but barely. My current rank’s twelve out of 1280 students in the class.”
“There’s still hope,” Paul responded. “Letters from your Dr. Dixon and from James Van Allen should go a long way in improving your chances. Of course, I’d love it if you came here.”
“So would I, and that’s a problem,” I countered. “Much as I love you, and I do love you, if we were both at the same university, the temptation would be too great for us to spend our time together. Maybe even room together or rent an apartment together. Neither of us would even try to date girls, and I fear we’d both end up bein’ queer.”
“Yeah, you’re undoubtedly right,” Paul agreed. “Much as I’m excited by the prospect, I don’t want to end up being gay. I want to be normal. Still, I love you very much, and this is our last night together…”
Paul started undressing, and I followed his lead. Soon, we were standing naked in front of each other, our boners pointing to each other’s chin. Grabbing hold of his, I pulled him close and looked down into his beautiful green eyes. He grabbed hold of mine and we kissed passionately, stroking each other so slowly that it was painful. We lay down on my bed together as we continued making out and stroking each other, at first slowly but then with more and more fervor.
It wasn’t long before we were satisfied, but we were just getting started. We both remained hard after we came and we never even stopped making out as our tongues dueled for supremacy. Our cum lubricated our movements as it spread onto the sheets. I was gonna hafta find time to do a load of laundry tomorrow morning, before my mom arrived.
I licked Paul’s ears, nibbled at his collar bone, nipped and sucked at his nipples. We flipped around and I found my chin resting on his feet as he sucked my toes. I returned the favor, thoroughly washing the spaces between his toes with my tongue. Not everyone likes feet, but Paul and I sure did. I enjoyed placing the soles of his feet across my face on either side of my nose as I inhaled his scent. I never understood how something so unpleasant could give me pleasure when I was excited.
We worked our way up our legs and thighs until we were face to crotch with each other’s genitals. Then I felt Paul’s finger tip teasing me and then pushing inside. We’d never done anything like that before. When he touched something inside of me, electric shocks spread through my core. The feeling was so intense that I dropped him from my mouth and cried out.
“Are you okay?” Paul asked.
“More than okay,” I replied. “I don’t know what you touched, but the feeling was more intense than anything I’ve ever felt in my life. I’d offer you my first born to feel that again.”
“You can keep your first born. Changing his diapers would be messy. Instead, you can pay me a reasonable fee. I take Master Charge, BankAmericard and American Express.”
“You’re saying you want to be my concubine?” I said as I laughed hysterically.
“No, I want you to be mine,” Paul replied. As our laughter subsided. He added, “Seriously, queers stick their dicks up there, so I figured there had to be something in it for the one being fucked as well as the one doing the fucking.”
“I think you found it,” I said, “but I’m not gonna let you stick your thing up there. That’s just too queer, and it would hurt.”
“Yeah, I feel exactly the same, but you sure didn’t seem to mind me using my index finger.”
“That’s an understatement,” I replied. “Would you like me to do that to you too?” I asked.
“Let’s both do it together,” Paul responded.
We’d both gone soft when we started laughing, but our boners returned in an instant. It didn’t take me long to find a bump inside of Paul that caused him to shudder. We both went at it with our mouths, tongues and fingers until I experienced the most earth-shattering climax of my life.
I dropped Paul from my mouth as I came — I couldn’t help it — but then I felt Paul erupt at nearly the same time as jet after jet of his spunk hit me in the face. When we recovered, we both had each other’s cum all over our faces and chests, and even in our hair. We probably should have cleaned up, but we went right back to making out again.
We spent most of the night making love, leaving ourselves completely spent and exhausted. I’m sure our friends noticed how out of it we were at breakfast, but it truly was a night to remember.
