Speaking as a computer geek with no talent whatever for the visual arts, I'm curious: Why in the world would artsy folks back then (or even now) want a Computing Office? What did he do with it?
And yes to Beowulf! I read it as a child and adored it; I still have vivid mental images of monsters in deep water-filled pits in a swamp, and of dragon's acid hissing on one's skin. Ghoulish creatures, little boys are. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* ...in February, United States coalition-building efforts are dealt a severe blow when France announces that it will not participate in the impending Iraq invasion, a decision that, in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "could seriously impair our ability to surrender". -Dave Barry's 2003 Year in Review */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Friday, April 15, 2022 15:37 Yes to the editing! The Xerox I learned PL/C on was a Xerox 530, a midrange that my dad bought for the nascent Arts Computing Office at University of Waterloo, which he was creating to bring computing to the Arts faculty. At the time, UofW had a 360/75 and a /44, but those were in the Math building and inaccessible to Artsies. He had started in computing in the 50s working on machine translation for The Government (read: CIA), a failed project that led into another failed project to do the same thing at IBM Yorktown in the 60s. At CIA, he was the linguist, and would tell a programmer what he wanted a program to do; the programmer would write it out on autocoder sheets, give it to a keypunch operator, and a day later he'd find out that it didn't work. He figured out that if he could learn to write the programs, it'd be faster and easier, so he did. That led into creating concordances, first of Beowulf (there's a throwaway line in Annie Hall, "Just don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf", which my family finds inordinately humorous, since we lived with that book for *years* during this project) and then of various other things, including Freud and Virginia Wolff. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
