Career, Family And Living For The Lord
-
A Twenty-Five Year History

In August 1973, which was about fifteen months after I had graduated from Old Dominion University (ODU) with my degree in Mathematics, I felt the urge to return to school. This time, I was interested not only in studying Graduate-level Mathematics, but I also wanted to study some computer courses. I was enjoying my billet as Automated Data Processing Officer, and the experience was good. But I wanted some formal education in computers so that my career in Data Processing would be on more solid footing.

For me, going back to school made perfect sense (see Table 3). First, I wanted to pursue my relatively new interest in computers. Second, I wanted a degree which would be current when I came off active duty in October 1975. And third, I had worked hard for the previous five years, and I was beginning to feel that just working eight hours a day was not enough to fill my idle hours. In August 1973, I saw myself as trying to compete with 1975 graduates, and I was not completely certain that my 1972 Bachelors Degree in Mathematics would automatically guarantee me the job that I might want in 1975. Therefore, I wanted to be ready, and more schooling seemed like the logical answer!

Probably the biggest factor, though, was related to my having flunked out of Old Dominion University in June 1967 with straight "F"s. My Grade Point Average for that year had been 0.017, and I had been placed on a one-year suspension. Because of an administration error that had occurred in 1966, the school had never combined my two sets of grades. After graduation, I was afraid that they might do so after the fact and then somehow find a way to nullify my degree. For that very special reason above all the others, I wanted to earn a Masters Degree so that I would at least have a Graduate-level degree in my chosen field even if for some reason my earlier degree were taken away.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 3. My Reasons For Going Back To School
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. I wanted to pursue my relatively new interest in computers.

2. I wanted a degree which would be current when I would come off active duty in October 1975.

3. I was beginning to feel like just working eight hours a day and helping Linda raise our family were not enough to fill my idle hours. I wanted to be doing more!

4. Probably the biggest factor, though, for my desire to go back was related to my having flunked out of Old Dominion.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Flunking out of school in 1967 had been a very big failure in my life, and it had happened largely because I had lacked the commitment and discipline to stick to a given course. After becoming a Christian in such dramatic fashion in December 1967, I had become like a new person. The Bible says, in II Corinthians 5:17, that we become a new creature in Christ when we come to Him, and in my case, I really had! In fact, I am pleased to announce that I had become a new person in Him in many ways even before I knew exactly what that meant.

Thus, for a lot of different reasons, going back to school was a good decision. Being able to go back to school, given my terrible academic past, was also a tremendous blessing! I found a Graduate program at the College of William and Mary which was split evenly between Mathematics and Computer Science, so I sought and gained admission. Because my Grade Point Average at ODU the second time around had been so low, only 2.433, I wrote a letter to the school promising that I would work very hard if they would only give me a chance. The letter worked, and I was enrolled in my first class in August 1973.

Linda and I were both working hard, but we were happy. Many people might think that the most difficult part of going back to school is the course work, but that was definitely not true in our case. Going to school, while married, with children, and working, requires tremendous commitment and dedication. Had Linda and I not both been willing to make a lot of sacrifices, I would not have been able to work towards my degree. Time and money are big factors in higher education. In Luke 14:28-30, the Bible teaches that a person should count the cost before building a tower, and the same is true concerning the pursuit of an education. We were struggling to pay our bills. But we sucked it in a little further and made the necessary sacrifices, as a team, so that I might get the education that had once seemed so unimportant to me. In October of that year, Crystal was born, thus our life was made even more hectic. But that was all right, too, because we felt that we could handle it.

Shortly after starting the program at William and Mary, Linda and I were notified that our military housing had become available and that we were set to move in November. How crazy my travel schedule had been up to that point, and how crazy that move would cause it to continue to be! While at the Shipyard, I had lived in Hampton, worked in Newport News, and driven about forty miles round trip, four nights per week, through a toll bridge tunnel to go to Old Dominion University in Norfolk. After the move, I would be living and working in Norfolk and driving about sixty miles round trip, through the same toll bridge tunnel, to attend William and Mary at their extension campus in Newport News. Towards the end of my degree program, I would even be required to take a couple of courses on campus in Williamsburg so that I could satisfy the school's residency requirement. And during those days, the round trip commute would be about one hundred miles.

One could easily say that I had had my travel setup in a somewhat reverse order, and in the early-to-middle seventies, that reversed order and lengthy commute was very significant! In the midst of the oil shortage crisis of that time period, I had to drive my gas hog, 8-cylinder, 1963 Plymouth Belvedere from Norfolk to school a couple days per week. But because of the gas shortage, all drivers were limited to only five dollars worth of gas, once every other day. And on top of that, they usually had to wait up to an half-hour most days to even buy it. So, for Linda and me, with our five children and very little money, this whole education process was posing an extreme financial hardship. But the Lord was faithful to us throughout the entire time. Even though it was always difficult to meet the demands of our rigid lifestyle, we always found a way. Even though we really did not have much money, we always found a way, by God's grace, to get by. For one thing, we were not alone! I had made some friends at work who were a great comfort to me. One man, in particular, was an older man, named Dudley. He was about twenty, maybe even thirty years older than I, but he was a Christian and a very good role model and mentor for me. We often spoke about matters of our Faith, and he helped me, still young and spiritually lacking in so many ways, to understand a lot of precious things about the Bible.

Dudley was a very good person, and he did for me something which I still remember over twenty years later. It is also something that needs to be shared. As the command's Automated Data Processing Officer, called ADP Officer for short, I would frequently have out-of-town, business associates in the office. Because they were my guests, I was usually expected to take them to lunch, but because I had so little money, I usually could not pay for my own lunch, much less theirs! On many of those occasions, Dudley quietly slipped me some money so that I could perform that important part of my duty without having to feel embarrassed, and he never asked me to repay him. One time during my three years with him, I tried to show my gratitude by buying his lunch, but because he did not really have any great financial needs, he simply told me what I now often tell others. He said, "Pass it on!" In other words, he was telling me to show the same kindness and generosity to others that he had shown to me, and through the years, I have tried to do so. Dudley was a tremendous inspiration to me, and he had a very favorable influence on me.

My curriculum at William and Mary consisted of fifteen hours in Graduate-level Computer Science courses and fifteen hours in Graduate-level Mathematics courses. Because my date to be released from active duty was October 1975, I knew that I would have to be done with all of my course work in two years. Therefore, I chose to write a thesis and thus eliminated having to take two additional courses. That decision meant that my degree would be a Master of Science (MS) degree instead of a Master of Arts (MA) degree, but since my earlier degree at ODU had been a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, I was pleased by that distinction.

Writing a thesis requires a lot of work, usually in the form of research. At the Graduate level, where the student pursues a Masters degree, the focus is on doing the research and then in writing a detailed paper. At the Post-Graduate level, where the student is pursuing a Doctorates degree, the focus is on making an actual contribution to one's field and then in writing a detailed paper. While my work may have technically been only at the Graduate level, I actually did work which would have probably qualified at the Post-Graduate or Doctorates level, and this is how the whole thing happened!

We had several civilian analysts at COMOCEANSYSLANT, and they conducted their analysis using live data from the command's CDC 3100 computer. Our computer, over which I had direct responsibility and control, contained an active military database, but it did not have that data in an electronic form that was readily available for use. Our facility was a data reservoir which received massive amounts of information from all over the Eastern Theater of Naval Operations, but that data could only be viewed and extracted manually from printouts. Our analysts would have to read data from a printout, enter it manually into their calculators, and then do their calculations and quantitative analysis. One day in the office, Dudley told me that there was a better way to make our valuable information available to those who needed it.

He told me that I could write a program, using the training which I had received a couple of years earlier at the CDC 3100 school in Rockville, Maryland along with my training at William and Mary, that would let our analysts interact directly with the computer's database. What he was suggesting was that I could make up my own computer language and then write the computer program which would execute that language. An example of this is a language like BASIC or FORTRAN. When a person writes a program in one of those languages or another similar language, they actually use another program, either called a compiler or an interpreter, to transcribe their program into something which the computer can recognize. In my case, I would be developing an interpreter.

An interpreter is much easier to write than a compiler. When a programmer puts his or her program into the compiler, it builds an object deck which can then be grouped with other object decks to create an executable system. Compilers are generally very sophisticated and usually allow for much more sophisticated operations. Interpreters do not create an object deck, and they are not grouped or linked with other objects. Therefore, they are also much more basic and much less sophisticated. Yet, they are still useful, and the one which I planned to develop for my command could be used by my civilian co-workers to better do their job. It could also be used by the committee at William and Mary to satisfy my thesis requirement.

I began by making up my own commands, those which have been listed in Table 4. My language, as it turned out, was very similar to the version of FORTRAN that I had taught to my co-workers at the Shipyard, and as a Mathematician might approach any problem so I approached this one. I knew that my interpreter would have to make two passes through the user's program, the first to identify variables and labels and the second to actually execute the program. An important part of any computer language is the ability to redirect the program's flow, and this is often accomplished by the GOTO statement. If the GOTO statement says to "go to" a point which is ahead of, or below, the current point in the program, then a first pass of the program would have been necessary to know the location of that lower point.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 4.  Instruction Set For My Computer Language
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Instruction Set For My Computer Language

Declaration Statements
	REAL, INTEGER, STRING, and BOOLEAN

Executable Instructions
	TERMINATE
	GOTO
	IF (X) THEN (Y)
	FOR I = n TO N
	BACK - this is the same as CONTINUE in FORTRAN
	WHILE (I.op.N)
	n:MAT (X1, X2, ...) - this is the same as FORMAT in FORTRAN where "n" is the statement number
	WRITE
	PUNCH - produces punch card output
	CARD - accepts punch card input
	ENTER - accepted input from the console typewriter
	FILE - provided direct access to the military database

Expressions
	EXP - exponentiation (ex)
	LN - natural logarithm
	LOG - base ten logarithm
	SQRT - square root
	FACT - factorial
	ABS - absolute value
	SIN - sine
	COS - cosine
	TAN - tangent
	ASIN - inverse of sine (arcsin)
	ACOS - inverse of cosine (arccos)
	ATAN - inverse of tangent (arctan)
	CNVRT - convert string to integer

Logical Expressions
	(x) AND (y)
	(x) OR (y) = inclusive OR
	(x) EOR (y) - exclusive OR
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Appendix D, I have described some of the key tables which I designed, along with the mathematical equations that I used. From start to finish, I designed my language, how it would be executed, and what mathematical techniques would be used. When the time came to defend my work before the Thesis Committee at William and Mary, I was in complete control. The computer program that I had written was about one hundred and fifteen pages in length, and this equated to about five thousand Assembler language instructions. The accompanying text that I had written to describe my language and its implementation and use, entitled The Implementation Of A Special Language Interpreter For The Control Data 3100 Computer, was ninety-seven pages in length. I completed all of my work in about seven months and was awarded my MS degree in August 1975, about two months before my scheduled release from active duty.