7/20/2016 Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
On November 3, Scott Fisher (MS CS ’76) returned to CS @ ILLINOIS as an Engineer in Residence (EIR) to teach students a bit of the history of the computing industry and to share advice for achieving success in the computing field.
As Fisher pointed out, the University of Illinois has been a leader in the computing science field for more than 60 years. A display on the first floor of Siebel Center features information on ORDVAC and ILLIAC I, two essentially identical computers that were designed and built on the university campus. Of particular significance to Fisher was the innovation in computing that ORDVAC, which as built for the U. S. Army, represented: it was “the first computer ever that was built, taken apart, put on a truck, sent somewhere—Washington, D.C.—put back together, and still worked,” Fisher explained. “That was amazing.”
The ILLIAC computers went through four generations, and Fisher remembered the ILLIAC IV from his time as a student. Fisher showed off a computer punch card that he had used when he was a student in the department. He explained how each line of code was contained on a separate card. Once a collection of cards that represented a program had been completed, they were fed into the computer to run the program. “One of the downsides is that if you make a typing mistake, now it is wrong, and there is no erase key. So you have to redo it. So you typed slow to make sure it was right,” Fisher said. “We also had one of the early and classic timesharing computes, the DECsystem-10. One of the uses was to create a ‘card deck’ as a file and have it processed in Champaign or at Chicago Circle.”
And there were other dangers with the card deck as well. “If you drop them, that’s really bad,” Fisher said. “My thesis was tens of thousands of cards. What we used to do if you had a lot of cards was to draw a diagonal line across the top with a magic marker. If you dropped the cards you could align the cards and get it within a few cards, and then you could look at it by hand.”
Fisher said that the important part of the story is not just how things have changed over the past 35 years, but how they have remained the same in principle. Current computers, while unimaginably more powerful, still follow the principles outlined by John von Neumann in 1945.
Fisher also had other show and tell items that he described to the students, including a DECtape, a magnetic storage medium developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. At the time, these tapes were relatively expensive, but it was a sure way to save programs. “This tape is astonishing. Most tapes are a linear set of records. This is actually block structured. It has a master file directory in the middle of the tape. So you add and delete files on the tape. And this ran really fast in both directions,” Fisher said.
Of the tape he demonstrated at his talk, Fisher said, “My master’s is on here, because I always had a backup, but of course I can’t read it because [we don’t have any machines left that can read it].”
Fisher also showed off a sample of magnetic core memory from one of the first computers he worked on. “This was about 45 years ago, and it was 4KB, and it was state of the art,” he said.
Fisher then described how he took the education he gained at Illinois and launched his own career. He worked for a number of leading technology companies, such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Philips NV, Remmele Engineering, and Minco. Since 2008 he has been with Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services. At Ecolab he manages the IT group supporting the company’s largest sales division. His team develops software to collect data from industrial controllers, the Internet of Things, and manages chemistry and regulatory data. “Here’s a company that does chemistry and service,” Fisher said, “but it also got a group that knows how to interface hardware.”
Fisher said that he believes he has been successful as a manager at Ecolab because he tries to develop and maintain an atmosphere where fun and serious work coincide have been a key to his team’s success. Some of his parting advice for the students was for them to look for that kind of atmosphere in any future employment. “When you go out to find a job, find out the chemistry of the department,” he said. “What’s it like. Is it a group that gets along quite well and helps each other and wants to win?”
CS @ ILLINOIS Engineer in Residence (EIR) Program
As an Engineer in Residence (EIR), alumni reside in the department for a day or more to help students develop their computer science education into valuable applications and successful careers. The time with the department typically includes a presentation, informal meetings with students and faculty, and holding office hours for students interested in more personalized advice. Our students benefit significantly from the real-world experiences that our alumni have to share. If you are interested in participating in the EIR Program, please email Michelle Wellens at mwellens [at] illinois [dot] edu.