Subscribe to
Posts
Comments

Pictures from David Lin’s (`00) UCI ICS Alumni meetups

December 23rd, 2007 by Albert T. Wong `01

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading ... 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/

3 Responses to “Pictures from David Lin’s (`00) UCI ICS Alumni meetups”

  1. on 05 Jan 2008 at 5:20 pm1 Frank Hale

    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.

  2. on 06 Jan 2008 at 10:40 pm2 Jesse Hsia

    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

  3. on 07 Jan 2008 at 10:14 am3 Frank Hale

    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

Leave a Reply