Memoirs of James Pate Williams Jr – Page 34

Days of my Relatively Wasted Youth by James Pate Williams, Jr. BA, BS, MSwE, PhD

“I never dared to be radical when young

For fear it would make me conservative when old.”

Quote by Robert Frost

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/3219.html

Fortunately for me, I did not follow Frost’s sometimes sage advice. I was radical in youth and I have remained true to a modification of my 1984 variant self.

If you knew me before 1984 or even 1994, I was an insane mess of an individual. I was a strange misfit of a character in the 8^th to 12^th grades of middle school and high school. I started emulating my father by imbibing ethanol when I was 11 years old at my sister Susan Williams Harrison’s high school graduation party in the spring of 1965. I also started smoking cigarettes at the youthful age of 14 in 1967 and I kept up that filthy and unhealthy addiction until June 1994. My father also smoked cigarettes while I was growing up and then in his old age a pipe.

I distinctly recall scribbling Albert Einstein’s tensor equations from his little but germinal and profound book “The Meaning of Relativity” on the blackboard of my 9^th grade homeroom. Although I did not have a complete grasp of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus, I understood that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and its gravitational field equations (Einstein’s replacement theory of gravitation that took the place of the classical theory of gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton ) admitted essentially two cosmologies: cyclic universe that expanded and then contracted or a static universe. I treated the equations back in those halcyon days of my youth as a form of art or graffiti.

I was an off the chain psycho-sociopathic individual until I underwent my first true phase transition in approximately 1984. From the ages of 17 until 31 I was in a Drug Induced Psychosis (DIP) and self-medicating for an inherited and environmentally caused different brain chemistry aberration.

During high school to keep my disruption of my classrooms to a minimum, my teachers would send me to either the chemistry or physics laboratories and the teachers hoped I would entertain myself without blowing up the school or poisoning adjacent classes with gases emanating from improperly conducted experiments. I recall an iodine gas creating chemical reaction that I should have performed under the hood being made without proper ventilation. An eerie and relatively toxic cloud of purple iodine gas resulted, and the chemistry teacher and I rushed to contain the reaction under a hood.

Well so much for my somewhat wasted in more ways than one high school years. Things got worse rather than better in the era of my youth 1971 until Spring 1978. I did the whole spectrum (gamut) of illicit and legal drugs with a special penchant for hallucinogens and hard narcotics. However, in the summer of 1978 I met my calling which was and always is open source development of computer software. I have not met a computer programming language that I did not love.

I hope my beloved hometown of LaGrange, Georgia, and its currently rather diverse population has empathy for my insane and sane diametrically opposed selves.

Two of My Many Sorting Algorithms Implementations by James Pate Williams, Jr. BA, BS, MSwE, PhD

A recurring theme in my life has been to implement and re-implement the sorting algorithms found in Harold Lorin’s treatise Sorting and Sort Systems and Thomas H. Corman et al.’s Algorithms. I purchased a copy of Lorin’s book in the summer of 1979 and Corman’s textbook in 1999 or 2000. This has been good exercise in translating from one computer language to a later and greater newer computer language. I began in BASIC and FORTRAN IV and transitioned to C, C++, C#, Common LISP, Java, Modula-2, Pascal, and Scheme in alphabetic not chronological order. In this blog we cover two C# applications, one from October 26, 2010, named Sorting Comparisons and the other from January 17, 2015, with the moniker Sorting.

In the Sorting Comparisons application, we compare the sorting algorithms: Heap Sort, Quick Sort, and Singleton’s Sort. The first two algorithms are from the Algorithms tome and Singleton’s Sort is from Lorin’s treatment. These are some of the fastest general purpose sorting algorithms available in my particular arsenal.

Sorting Comparisons Test All 16 Sorting Comparisons Time All 1000

Sorting Comparisons Source Code

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Tests-of-Six-Sorting-94aa6fd0?redir=0

Excerpt from My Memoirs “Clinging onto the Edge of the Abyss” by James Pate Williams, Jr. BA, BS, MSwE, PhD

I believe in late spring quarter of 1978, Mr. P.M. Hicks, a chemistry and physics professor at LaGrange College, introduced me to a large desktop Texas Instruments (TI) programmable calculator. I immediately became immersed in the manual and I learned the rudiments of calculator programming on this machine.

I advanced onto LaGrange College’s new Data General Eclipse minicomputer in the summer of 1978. I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) using the book “BASIC Programming” by Paul W. Murrill and Cecil L. Smith of which I still own a copy and it is copyrighted 1971. I seem to recall I special ordered the textbook from the LaGrange College library. This self-study put me many steps in front of my peers in the Fall Quarter of 1978 when I took a course under Professor Kenneth Cooper on BASIC programming. I taught Professor Cooper how to perform matrix and vector calculations using the Data General BASIC interpreter.

I also was taking my first course in physical chemistry in the fall of 1978. During the week of Monday, November 6, 1978 my physical chemistry partner Chuck H. Pitts (now Dr. Chuck H. Pitts, a prominent dentist in LaGrange, GA) did an experiment whose lab report title was “Determination of Molecular Size and Avogadro’s Number”. I seem to recall the division of labor was that I perform the calculations with the aid of a BASIC computer and Chuck and I would write up the experiment and I believe someone in the Callaway Foundation office or Chuck did the actual typing of the document at the Callaway Foundation office on Broome Street in LaGrange, GA. Well it took a lot of persuasion by Chuck to get me to do my part, since back in that era I was prone to destructive perfectionism. (Incidentally, I did not give up on being a perfectionist until Professor Felton at Georgia Tech in 1981 stated categorically “There is no room for perfectionism in science.”)

In the Winter Quarter of 1979 I took a FORTRAN (Formula Translator) IV course under Professor Kenneth Cooper. That quarter I also had Professor Cooper for Physical Chemistry II and Biochemistry. I did well in the computer programming course and I can remember helping several fellow students to pass the course. Professor Brooks Shelhorse then of the Math Department was one of my fellow classmates that I tutored. Biochemistry was an 8:00 AM course. I spent a lot of late nights in the computer lab, so I would sometimes fall asleep during the biochemistry lectures. I distinctly remember Dr. Cooper hurling an eraser near me to wake me up one morning. I made B’s in the two chemistry courses.

Spring Quarter of 1979 was my final quarter as a chemistry student at LaGrange College. I took Quantitative Analysis II, an Independent Study in Chemistry, General Physics III, and Angling. I made all A’s that quarter. The independent study was an introductory course to architecture and programming of the Intel 8085 microprocessor. Dr. Cooper in his time as a computer engineering student at Auburn University had built two very nice and unique computers, a rather large analog computer and a digital computer that consisted of an Intel 8085 microprocessor in a wooden box with hexadecimal keypad, two seven segment red light emitting diode displays, EEPROM, and RAM memory. I used the digital computer in my independent study. Professor Cooper taught me about the instruction set for the microprocessor and I would hand assemble my assembly language programs into two hexadecimal digit strings of machine code and manually enter the machine code via the keypad. One of my first assignments was to count down from 0xFF = 255 decimal to 0x00 = 0 decimal. I had a delay of about a ¼ second built into the program, so it took me one minute and four seconds to count down to zero. I was the only student in my independent study, therefore, it sometimes felt funny to have Professor Cooper give a whole one-hour lecture to an audience of one.

I bought the IBM book “Sorting and Sort Systems” by Harold Lorin in the summer of 1979. I proceeded to implement most of the sorting and merge algorithms in the book. I first translated the IBM PL/I (Programming Language I) code to BASIC and later for FORTRAN IV. Professor Cooper had developed a large BASIC program for the LaGrange College Registrar, Jimmy Herring. This program used a slow sorting algorithm which was either Shell sort of Bubble sort. I implemented a very fast sorting algorithm named Singleton’s sort in BASIC and was able to dramatically cut the time required to sort all the students by their Social Security Administration numbers which many colleges and universities then used as their primary flat-file or database key. I also began teaching myself the Data General Advanced Operating System (AOS) macro-assembly language. Like many computer programmers before I became infatuated with all the control over an operating system that assembly language afforded a knowledgeable programmer.

I convinced my parents to pay for me to audit Calculus and Analytic Geometry IV under Professor Shelhorse during the Fall Quarter of 1979, so I would have an excuse to be on campus to use my favorite computer, the LaGrange College Data General Eclipse minicomputer. That quarter I re-implemented my fast sorting algorithm in assembly language and set a new sorting time record with a program that sorting about 1000 student data records. Since the code was in AOS macro-assembly language it could not be readily integrated with the existing registrar’s system.

In 1980 I bummed around the college using the computer system until I was accepted to chemistry graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the Fall Quarter of 1980. I taught myself Data General Pascal and furthered my work with macro-assembly language, BASIC, and FORTRAN IV in the Winter, Spring, and Summer Quarters of 1980 at LaGrange College. I was unpaid computer programming teaching assistant for those three quarters which allowed me to earn my keep so to speak.

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