David Stockwell:  

College was interesting: Did a couple of things before settling down into computer science: Swim team (20000 yards a day), French, Geology, Math, and even ran for ASB president. In the computer science field it was always a bit interesting: When I officially declared the major, Assembler (advanced class) became my first language because all the beginner classes were full. Weirdly all the systems manuals were always missing, so I was always having to teach myself how to navigate around the back recesses of the CDC, PDP, and HP systems. This led to mastery of assembler and discovery of many interesting findings as to how different computer systems worked. Wrote this in my spare time in college: One example I present here, was on the CDC system they gave students very little space to store work which normally amounted to about one program at a time. But I figured out how to grab more space by taking advantage of a little known feature. This involved writing a special shell as an assembler program which as part of its purpose, grabbed giant blocks of space and pre-reserved them for future use. I further extended the program a bit more which I won't go into detail here, but the end result is I was able to then store many programs (home work assignments) across the system, and reuse code. Reuse of code was unheard of back in the early 80's. But it made my life much easier and gave me more time to experiment. When I graduated, my roommate asked for my 'shell' scripts (asse...Expand for more