A Necessary Aside Happy Cinco de Mayo
I was raised by two doting parents and was treated like an only child even though I had two older sisters. Sometimes in the years 1957 to 1960, I would accompany my mother to LaGrange College (LC) and sit in her classes. If she could not get me in a class, I would sit in the parking lot of LaGrange College and work on plastic models. In my early childhood years, my mother and I would climb-into a passenger train bound for Roanoke, Alabama, to visit my grandmother and/or my uncle Lt. Col. US Army retired Charles “Worth” Jordan.
My mother was majoring in psychology on her way to earn another teaching certificate. Her first teaching certificate was granted by the State of Alabama. My mother first graduated from Jacksonville State University (Jax State - The Friendliest Campus in the South) in Alabama. I think Jax State was a female only university during my mother’s degree time at Jax. Anyway, she was having trouble with the New Math at LC that included Betrand Russell’s Axiomatic Set Theory. She brought a couple of library math and philosophy books home from the LC library for me to decipher. Later, when I was in fourth of fifth grade, I declared myself as an agnostic and my parents allowed me to quit going to Sunday School and Church Services at the little mill village Dixie Methodist Church on Fair Street in LaGrange, GA. Back to my mother somewhere in my filing cabinet of memories I have my mother’s typing certificate from Troup Technical School. Speaking of typing, I flunked out of that class when I was in my final years of high school. However, my father did teach me how to use a slide-rule, Roentgen dosimeter, and a Geiger counter.
My parents equipped me with all the toys necessary to aid in my scientific development. I had a late 1950s Lionel O gauge train set. Later, a Lionel chemistry set. I have a framed Lionel Periodic Chart of the Chemical Elements. My parents also purchased for me a microscope and reflecting telescope. Along the way, I had a small-sized slot-car racing set.
I also managed to crash two fuel powered string-controlled model planes, namely, a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk and a Boeing P-26 Peashooter. I could not get used to using the strings to control the model airplanes.
I used to hang out at the private (Colemen) and public (LaGrange Memorial) libraries. I seem to recall that in the 1960s, the Colemen libraries engineering section on the second floor was restricted for adults, but I was allowed to venture and peruse volumes in the forbidden section.
When I was a senior at LaGrange High School, I would cut up in my Physics class so the teacher would send me to the lab to work on an oscilloscope and other physics devices.
I built a good number of plastic model airplanes, jets, military ships, battle tanks, etc. I especially liked Revell and Monogram model kits before their merger. I built a model of the Confederate privateer, CSS Alabama which Raphael Semmes commanded.
Author: jamespatewilliamsjr
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
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Numerical Explorations 