Pictures from David Lin’s (`00) UCI ICS Alumni meetups
December 23rd, 2007 by Albert T. Wong `01
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading ...Alums,
Each year David Lin `00 throws some excellent UCI ICS Alumni meetups. This year’s was no exception with 10+ alums showing up for Dim Sum in Irvine. To see pictures from this event and others, check out the ICS Alumni flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/groups/ucirvine/
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I’ve been watching this blog since November,
and it is really dead around here.
How many ICS Alumni are there in the world?
It seems like there are about 12 involved here.
How many ICS Alumni have already left
the field, either through retirement or
career change?
(I’m planning to retire from a career in
scientific computation with UC,
and become an English teacher this year.)
I get a feeling that there are significant
“generation gaps” among ICS alumni.
For example, those who were trained
on “big iron” systems of the 1960’s
vs. “micro” or RISC sytems that came in the
late 1980’s.
(I remember David Patterson as a young,
new prof.)
Or before and after internet.
Or before and after Web.
Core memory. Punched tape and cards.
Et cetera.
I’m not sure how many alumni from before
1990 would even find this blog.
Hi Frank,
Thank you for following the blog thus far and leaving a comment. I would have to agree with you regarding the low activity on this blog. Rather than providing excuses to the lack of activity, we really just have to post more often.
Also, let us know what topics you would like us to blog about. Feedback of any kind can really help steer us in the right direction.
Regarding your first question, I believe the total number of ICS alums are in the thousands, I believe it’s 6000? This is the closest number as far as I can remember. Hopefully other alums can chime in if they know the exact figure.
To your “generation gaps” comment, I’m definitely part of the “before and after Web” generation and I can’t say I know much about how things were done all way back in the 60s. I’ve heard of punch cards but have never seen one. It would be cool to have some sort of a software engineering history class to learn how software building has evolved.
Jesse
Hi Jesse,
Would the ICS Department have stats somewhere,
maybe even a nice graph,
with the number of degrees granted each year
(and cumulative numbers, as well)?
I’ve been in Berkeley, mostly, since I graduated
from UCI in 1981, first as a grad student,
and then as staff. One of the most interesting
CS graduation speakers was from a very old professor
who was involved with the invention of the hard disk
for storage.
We hired three new staff members into my group
during the past couple years, in their late 20’s and
early 30’s. They, too, had never seen a punched card,
and could not understand the “coding style” of some
of our older scientists which was still influenced by
punched card formats, even though the cards are long gone.
So I created a historical display in my office for my young
colleagues.
When I was at UCI, Tim Standish taught ICS 2 or 3,
intro to data structures, with photocopy manuscripts of
his new book (ca. 1978), and Jim Meehan, who left for
MIT in the early 1980’s, taught AI. Our ICS 16x Intro
to programming languages used punched cards,
and we studied FORTRAN, COBOL, SNOBOL and, I think,
APL. We used Pascal Micro-engine machines (early
stand-alone microcomputers) that had hardware
interpreters of P-code (Pascal based microcode) for our
compiler development class. I never used Unix until I
got to Berkeley in graduate school.
My senior software engineering project class was taught
by Peter Freeman. He went on to head the CS department
at Georgia Tech. Last time I talked with him, in the early
2000’s, he was at NSF in Washington.
I’m still curious about how many ICS alumni are still
active in the field, either in software development (my area),
system development, or even sales or policy.
(I worked for a few years in government computing policy).
I gave my first computer science talk in 1967,
on algorithms for number base conversion (between
decimal and binary), and binary arithmetic.
I’ve been working in the field since 1975, when a
megabyte of magnetic core memory occupied a large room.
I’m ready to retire now, and go enjoy my interests in
languages and literature, and teach and write.
Do any of the young alumni have any idea how to develop
and analyze software and algorithms for multicore
architectures? I think that is the next big challenge.
We had 50 years, from the 1930’s (Turing, Goedel, etc.)
to the 1980’s (first personal computers) to develop a solid
theoretical base for single processor systems.
Best regards,
Frank Hale, ICS class of 1981
I just found this, after doing a search on Tim Standish - I took his compiler class back when I went to UCI.
I’m part of the in-between generation - graduated in 1987, so micro-computers were dominated by things like Radio Shacks TRS-80. UCI has a DEC-10 in the computer room and only 10 or so ports were available to students during the day.
I’m still in the software engineering racket, but focused my attention on software testing, as I found this to be much more challenging that development, and I figured that since there have been no real breakthoughs in producing more solid code, there would always be a demand for people like me.
But alas, software testers are going the way of technical writers for reasons I won’t go into at this point.
I’ve seen the software landscape change over the years, and I must say I don’t think its for the better… Maybe that’s because I’ve gotten old and cynical.