As David Alan Grier would have said, this kind of event tends to serve to build the professional identity of a group of people. Computer science is not a profession per se, but it is clear that the Uppsala computer science students (almost 2000 has started since 1981) has a particular culture that comes back to us very easily when amongst our peers. I think it is based in the art and practice of programming.

The talks and discussions during the dinner often went back to the defining experiences of our student days, and these experiences were mostly about night hacks and classic labs. A speaker told us about how in 1983 they tried to program a simple computer built by the department itself, and how it turned out that 3 out 4 machines were broken. There idea that they expected the program to just work the first time it loaded made me look up my favorite debugging quote. Somebody reminded me (19 years after the deed) about the time I made a Prolog program exhaust all memory on a Sun server, by performing an exhaustive search for a problem with no solution).

I remembered how some students I taught (while still an undergraduate myself, a common practice at DV) spent 24 hours a day for almost a week in a lab room trying to get their operating systems to boot on some MIPS-based lab machines. In particular, the group that was gripped by ambition and tried to turn on the MMU. Each time they reset the machine and tried to boot their OS, they would see a serial terminal spewing out diagnostics text and then stopping cold… as they failed again to make it work (they passed the course anyway).

This all indicates the fundamental importance of programming to computer science students. That is also what we believed was our core mission when I was a student – to go out into the world and create great software. Many still do, even if quite a few of us have left day-to-day coding to become project leaders and outright managers. Can’t say I program all that much myself, apart from some demos and virtual machine scripts, but I still find the topic incredibly interesting and important.

The event also touched on institutional memory and the longevity of data. The very ambitious anniversary committee had produced a brand new version of the classic “Manualen”, a song book first produced in 1995. In it, I found a text I wrote in 1995 about what a computer scientist actually does (a bit pompous, as can be expected from a proud student) as well as a photo of myself from a 1996 cover of the DV student magazine “Blurgel”. However, in both cases, these had been reproduced from paper copies. There was no digital memory in place of these 15-year-old pieces of data.

I actually still have both paper copies in good shape and the data – on a multisession CD-R created in 1999 on a Mac. My current computers all being Windows-based cannot extract the data. I know a Mac can still read them, but it is not clear that the data can be used today. It is likely in some old version of Aldus PageMaker and with no file extensions to guide you as to what each file is. The images are greyscale or black-and-white high-resolution TIFF files I believe (from the era before PNG), once again with no file extensions to hint at what is what. It underscores the importance of actual running programs and systems as a way to access our digital past. The data might all be there and readable, but with no software to interpret it, what can you do? I actually noted the same four years ago for the somewhat late 25 years anniversary.

Overall, a very memorable evening, and kudos to the organizers for putting it all together.

The picture shown here was saved as GIF for use on the web. But scarily enough, apart from a few more GIF files, I could not open or even understand the file type of most of the files from that time, only ten years ago. Our digital archives are not very robust — more on that below.

What is kind of scary is that apart from the various GIF and TIFF renderings of the logo in various uses (for usage on the primitive web pages of 1996 mainly), I cannot retrieve the design data. It is all inside FreeHand 4 or FreeHand 5 files, for the Mac platform, using postscript fonts that only worked on MacOS 7 and 8 with Adobe Type Manager. So even if the files themselves are salvagable using contemporary software in 2007, some of the basic data they are built from is irretrievable for me. I gave away my last old Mac five years ago, and it is now dead.

A bit scary. And a good example of when simulation of a computer system could serve us well as a way to preserve the entirety of old software environment. I think this is a typical case of when you need the complete system a document was built on and not just the document itself to correctly interpret it. I guess I should make sure to “freeze” some current system environment inside a disk image at some point, to have something to go back in the future. Provided some software behaving like a 2007 PC can be created and found.

Final note: it around this time that I designed the version of the “cons box” seen as part of the logo above. This served for quite a few years as the main style of the logo of the computer science program at Uppsala University. It seems to have fallen out of use now.

They also emailed out a call for pictures from the history of DV*. I’ll look through my old collections of memorabilia and see what I can find. What a chance for a trip down memory lane. It’s been ten years since I graduated. Time flies.