An article published in The New York Times back in the spring caught my eye.
Titled "Computing's Lost Allure" by Katie Hafner, it talked about Brian Harvey's introductory computer science class at the University of California at Berkeley. It mentioned that a mere 350 students had signed up for the course in the spring semester, a number that may seem large to the uninitiated but stands "in striking contrast to enrollment in the fall of 2000, when the same lecture hall was engorged at the start of the semester with 700 students sitting and standing in every available pocket of space."
It would seem that Professor Harvey's popularity with his students has lost none of its glow since he was plain old Mr. Harvey, quondam teacher of mathematics at the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School circa 1980. In those days Brian was a fairly recent alumnus of MIT and the Artificial Intelligence Lab, a computer whiz and visionary who preached computers to kids in an age, hard to imagine in retrospect, before the personal computer existed.
Those days witnessed the sudden metamorphosis of Jonathan (my son) in his sophomore year from a fairly bored and lethargic student into an avid computer enthusiast who, absent long hours from the house, was to be found holed up in the computer room at the high school at all hours of the day or night. There he seemed to be involved with his friends, first in computer games like "Trek and Rogue" using machines with exotic names like "Diablo" and then, suddenly, in a mysterious new mode of communications with computers over telephone lines.
Brian Harvey introduced a generation of L-S students to the allure of computers before there were many computers worthy of the name around. The first low-priced personal computer, the IBM 5150A, did not appear until the fall of 1981. In the absence of any kind of machine at the high school Brian set about the task of acquiring one with a proposal to the Digital Equipment Corporation, the nation's No. 2 computer maker in those days. (How the times have changed!)
DEC duly obliged with the generous donation of a PDP11-70, one of the so-called "minicomputers" of that time. A puny machine by modern standards, it comprised a 1 MIPS (million-instruction-per-second) processor with just 64K of program space for code and another 64K for data. It had one megabyte of main memory and ran AT&T Unix, Version 7. At any given time there were around 200 user accounts on the machine sharing 67 megabytes of disk space on a huge disk drive the size of a small refrigerator.
In the computer room students were in charge. Harvey had persuaded the school to allow kids to have keys to give them access after hours and on weekends. He had also convinced the school to allow a handful of students to be "super-users" with system administrative privileges and unlimited access to the operating system. The privileges came with considerable responsibility as student records and other data were on the computer. The super-users typically fixed problem accounts, repaired bad file systems and re-booted the machine when it crashed.
Electronic mail was just getting started around that time through the DARPAnet, the pre-cursor of the Internet. Our house seemed to be somehow permanently hooked up to the West Coast through the Stanford University computer via an old VT100 terminal and a primitive analog modem. I remember inquiring who was paying the phone bill.
These early computer kids were an oddball bunch in a high school that traditionally had favored "jocks" over "nerds." Labeled "computer fags," in what nowadays would no doubt be regarded as a lamentable lapse of political correctness, they were objects of derision and outright harassment in an equal opportunity environment that also apparently included "A/V (audio/visual) fags" and "band fags." Vandalism of terminals and cable interconnects was an everyday occurrence. The computer room project was widely regarded as an oddity, unlikely to last or amount to anything, which seems hard to believe in the light of what has happened since.
During his senior year Jonathan wrote a Unix editor known as JOVE (for Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs), which seemed to be very well regarded, bringing him recognition at an early age from around the world plus a little money. The high school computer room led to a stint at Bolt, Beranek and Neumann, thence to the University of Rochester and Sun Microsystems where in 1992 he eventually joined the secret "Green" project that produced the Java programming language.
In 1996 after a brief stint at Starwave in Seattle, he joined up with three former colleagues at Sun to found Marimba, a Silicon Valley Internet services company. Josh Sirota, Jonathan's high school friend, a computer whiz and avid racing driver, was the No. 5 employee at Marimba, now a thriving company recovering from the recent dot.com debacle.
Brian Harvey left L-S in the early '80s to get his PhD at Berkeley where he stayed on to teach. His whiz kids are now for the most part professional programmers, scattered around the country. They include among others: Mark and Josh Sirota, Scott Fraize, Mike Abbott, Mike Thome, Robert Brown, Jay Fenlason, Kevin Ruddy, Dave Corley and Mike Texeira.
One assumes they all made their fortunes during the boom years. They were there on the ground floor when it was all getting started. Meanwhile Brian Harvey continues his role of Pied Piper of student hackers at UC Berkeley.
By Richard Payne/ Town Crier Columnist
Thursday, December 4, 2003
