Starting my first year of high school, I worked helping to beautify our cottage property. Although my parents paid me something, it became a work of passion for me.
The cottage property had a large scooped-out descent to the lake, somewhat treacherous to get to the shore. I planned out a series of patios and a small staircase, as well as a large rock retaining wall. We had a crew with a bulldozer lay some felled tree trunks to form the base of the retaining wall, and also had loads of earth, sand and concrete blocks delivered after I had done the basics, which included back-filling the gully with all sorts of landscape debris. I dragged tree stumps, branches and all sorts of stuff to be buried in the patio.
Once the basic structure was ready, it was a huge job to cover the ugly tree trunks forming the lake-side of the patio wall with a rock wall. Not wanting to bother with concrete (and liking the more natural look) I decided to simply slant the wall and let it support itself. Getting the rocks was a huge job — I took all that I could from the lake, but many more required hauling with a wheelbarrow from all over our property and the surrounding hills. Then it was a matter of placing each rock in a way that it fit securely to form the wall.
I added a rock fire pit for nightly bonfires next to a huge rock slab that couldn’t be moved, a rock and log staircase, and a small concrete block wall to create the two now-level tiers of the sand-filled patio. I also found and transplanted some small pine trees from the back lot to areas where we would appreciate them, and created a small rock-and-moss garden with transplanted wildflowers and moss.
Our cottage had a wood-burning stove in the living room, used both for atmosphere and for quickly warming up the place after the cold nights. We also made almost nightly outdoor bonfires in the fire pit I built.
This required lots of wood. We also had tons of felled trees from when we had the space cleared for the cottage itself. And the guys who felled those trees used their chain saws to cut the trunks into manageable lengths. But in order to use them, they had to be split into quarters or smaller.
I was not one to do much manual labor, but I guess I rose to the occasion. I spent a few hours each morning splitting logs with an axe. Then I created a huge split-log pile behind the cottage. Soon there were so many split logs that I worried about fire hazard, so I arranged them in walls so that there was plenty of air around them. This became our “log fort”, and provided an endless supply of wood for all the years we were there… and much was still left when we sold the place!
I’d always loved photography, but when I started high school I joined the photography club and discovered the fascination of darkroom work — developing film and printing my photos.
Withing the first two years, I actually did a bit of “semi-professional” work (in that I charged a small amount for my portrait services). I convinced a local boy scout troop to let me do portraits, and sold a few to their parents. I also did a few school teacher portraits, and (although I no longer seem to have them) several small jobs photographing other cottages and gardens at Battle Lake where our cottage was.
When we lived at 562 Denbury in Ottawa I took on most of the landscape duties like cutting the lawn. I also planted some flower gardens, did the annual lilac bush pruning, and the year I graduated high school I decided that our front lawn could use a tree. We purchased a small (5′) silver maple sapling from Sears, and I planted it in the front lawn.
That winter a bad storm bent that sapling almost in half and I had to stretch it back up and add some stakes to try to save it. It did survive, but a small bend remained in its lower trunk.
Amazingly, I visited the house in about 2019 and found that not only was it still there, but it was now the tallest tree in the area, towering over our house! My high school graduation monument — 48 years later!!
While a student at Carleton University (officially for Geography, but more in computer science), I joined with two friends to see if we could “hack” the university mainframe — a Xerox Sigma 7.
I don’t think the work “hacking” was yet in common use. We were just interested in seeing if we could do it, as a personal challenge.
Long story short, we succeeded in finding an unprotected super account that gave us access to everything. To prove our success, we printed out a list of every user account and password on the system, some 50 pages, at the blinding speed of 15 CHARACTERS per second. The task took about 5 hours. And because we each wanted a copy as our “trophy”, we ran the process simultaneously on three teletype terminals.
Since we didn’t have any sinister motives, we then bound the printout like a booklet, and made an appointment with the computer center director. He was understandably shocked, but we didn’t face any disciplinary action because we explained that our motive was to show the vulnerability.
He then told us that they knew that “something” was happening, because the entire system became very slow for those few hours. (This was in a time when computers were still quite primitive — the multi-million dollar mainframe had only 256MB of memory, and about 1/1000 the power of a typical smartphone of the 2020-era!) He also told us that with what we had accessed, we potentially could have altered student grades, or even run the staff payroll — and no one would have questioned it!
I believe my participation in this venture is one of the factors that led to the job offer a few years later, when I went to work for the computer center.
While I was a Concordia I experienced the frustration of writing papers without the benefit of any sort of typesetting or formatting tools. Word processing didn’t exist yet.
Having only the university’s huge and cumbersome mainframe computer to work on (A CDC Cyber computer), I set out to solve this problem for myself by writing a rudimentary formatting program. On this computer model it was especially difficult because lower-case letters took two storage places (not exactly “bytes” because this was a decimal computer with variable length “words” — see below) while upper-case characters took a single place. So something simple like underlining a word was a huge undertaking. Printers were not able to underline a word without first printing the word (or line) and then backspacing to the beginning and adding the underline characters!
A brief web description of the unique features of the CDC Cyber computers: “The Cybers were interesting systems in that they were even then “throwback” systems. They used 60-bit words, octal arithmetic, one’s-complement arithmetic (which meant there is a negative zero as well as a positive zero, and they were sometimes not equal to each other), non-hierarchical file systems with seven-character file names, and used character coding unique to CDC (not BCD, not ASCII, and not EBCDIC, it was called “display code”). The fact that the Cyber 170 architecture used a word length that was not a power of two caused a few problems when programming at the bit level, and dealing with the 8-bit bytes that everybody else used (e.g. the AMS systems and offline plotters) made for an interesting challenge. “
Anyone who understands the above will recognize that creating a word processor on such a computer was a difficult task. No one would choose to use this computer for word processing, but I had no other choice.
As I worked on this and started using it a bit, some other grad students saw it and asked if they could use it. I realized that I actually had something to offer. So I worked hard at adding all sorts of features, and created what I called TypeSet. Many grad students started using it, and I even took feature requests from students and professors, adding many new features before I left in 1976. I heard it was still in use sometime after I left — until the first simple word processing programs came out on mini and micro-computers a few years later.
I’ve attached my TypeSet user manual — which was created entirely using TypeSet itself! By today’s standards it is laughable, but in 1975 on a mainframe, it was quite revolutionary!
Read a bit of the Typeset manual (below) to see how ridiculously complex a task it was to create a Typeset document. Yet because there was nothing better yet available, it enjoyed some popularity for a few years!
After graduating from Carleton I found out that Concordia University in Montreal was starting a Masters program in Computer Science. Together with a friend from Ottawa, I applied — and we were both offered a full scholarship which even covered out of town living expenses… so we both went.
We were each also offered the opportunity to teach an undergrad course in computer science, which we accepted. I found the experience of teaching a Fortran language programming class to 50 undergrad commerce students very enjoyable even though it required a lot of work.
I was rated by the class as part of the University’s policy of student appraisals, and was happy to receive a pretty positive rating as teacher.
As part of my thesis research I worked under the direction of a bright Polish professor, who had been working for years on using a mathematical construct called a decision table to analyze computer programs.
Without getting all technical (at this point I barely understand it myself!) suffice to say that I embarked on building an actual processor to use decision table techniques to analyze programs while they were still being designed. If done correctly, this could uncover logic bugs and inefficiencies in the design, long before the actual program was coded.
As an aside, I chose to write the processor in a language called APL. This language is no longer in use, and is extremely cryptic and difficult to master, but had incredibly powerful mathematical and matrix handling capabilities that are still unmatched.
At one point, once my automated processor was working, my advisor suggested that I write a paper about it and submit it to an upcoming national computer conference. (Little did I know then that if I published this work it would no longer be able to be used as my theses — something that I was very angry about later!)
So I wrote and submitted the paper, and it was accepted for publication! As part of this, I was invited to do a live presentation of the paper to a bunch of computer scientists at the conference!
I did so, and by and large received a lot of blank stares, as it was a difficult subject to explain, and the concept was, to most, unbelievable. In any case, I’ve attached the actual paper and the cover of the conference proceedings book in which it was published.
In April of 1976 I moved back to Ottawa to take a job at Carleton University’s Computer Center. This was like a dream to me!
The job was primarily to support academic use of the computer systems and software by students and professors. Each of us had responsibility for certain programs, and since my background was in geography, I ended up supporting certain mapping (SYMAP) and mathematical (MATHLAB) programs.
SYMAP was a very rudimentary (but heavily used) program that could produce maps using the computer printer — made up of typewritten characters overprinted to create densities. Like I said, very rudimentary. Graphic plotters were just emerging, and although the university owned one, there was no decent software for them yet.
Some professors expressed a desire to somehow be able to “overlay” two different maps in order to show various relationships — for example, a map of rock-types and a map of vegetation types, when overlaid, could potentially indicate best places to look for precious minerals… So I took on the challenge and created a SYMAP add-on program which I called SUPERMAP (for its ability to super-impose, not because it was superior!) This became quite popular with some social-economic geographers.
There was already a program called SYMVU that took SYMAP data points and produced a small three-dimensional graphic plot — however it was a cumbersome program and could only output the results to the plotter. Plotted output was very slow and expensive. So I undertook creating a very similar program that would run faster and be able to output the plots on CRT screen monitors. I called it PREVU, and it became quite popular within the Carleton geography and social studies departments.
A geology professor was suitably impressed and asked me to give a special lecture to his class. I accepted and showed how such a system could be used for remote sensing mapping — taking map data from early Earth-mapping satellites and using it to help in mineral exploration. [See also my “side note” at the end of this post for more interesting details]
One year Carleton had a visiting scholar from the university of Edinburgh in Scotland. He had developed one of the World’s first mapping programs that used a graphics plotter, and came to Carleton to continue that development. HIs program, GIMMS, could produce what were at the time high-resolution black and white plots of maps. Because of my background I worked quite closely with the GIMMS project and provided technical support to its users.
In my last year at Carleton, 1975-6, micro computers were just emerging. I saw potential in them, whereas the computer center itself had little interest. But as grad students and professors started inquiring about the potential use of such simple computers, I was given the added responsibility of being their Micro Computer Liaison.
My main project (which took come convincing) was to use a micro computer and a digitizing table to replace the aging and problematic digitizer that the geography department had used for mapping creation. Although the original digitizer was worth close to $100,000, I was successful in creating a functional replacement using a North-Star Micro computer and a new large digitizing tablet — which if I remember correctly cost a total of about $2000.
I have attached a couple of Carleton newsletters which showcase some of the projects I worked on…
Just before I left Carleton to move to Toronto, I participated in a software conversion project. Carleton had decided to move to a Honeywell mainframe after Xerox unexpectedly decided to exit the mainframe business. I converted and certified SYMAP and MATHLAB to run on the Honeywell machine, in cooperation with the companies that produced those software programs.
Side note: the geology professor that I mentioned earlier was named Patrick Arthur Hill. I took a class from him when I was an undergraduate student, and the following year — because I enjoyed his class so much — I actually sat in on his lectures for a class I was not enrolled in. He was an amazing teacher, and I’ve mentioned him to many people as my idea of what a university professor should be. His lectures, although on geology, included all sorts of references to countries around the world, cultures, etc. I remember him even describing how a certain geological formation had affected the music compositions of a particular area!
In any case, when I visited Carleton campus 20 years after I graduated, I tried to look him up. The geology department office told me that he was retired but that he still maintained a box and if I wanted to leave a note I could do so. So I wrote an impromptu note telling him how much I had enjoyed his lectures, reminding him that I had taught a guest lecture for him at one point, and just wishing him well. I was astounded when a few weeks later I got in the mail a handwritten note from him which I present below…
Sadly, I found out that he passed away two years after I left that note… And from his obituary learned a lot more about him that I wish I had known…
