The Debugger      Fall 1991

This is my first attempt at editing a newsletter of any kind. Like doing most things for the first time, I found that the editing task has included multiple learning experiences. I learned that some people require incessant nagging before they finish writing an article and some people can do the job overnight. I learned that editing takes more time that I had expected. And, I learned that it would be a bad idea to leave me alone in a room with one large magnet and the department's supply of WordPerfect disks - I might not be able to control myself.

In this issue, you will find several standard features: From the Chair, Carol's Corner, and News from Tompkins' Lab. Be advised that these were all written at different times in the Fall semester. So don't feel like you are in a time warp as you read about the winds of November and then suddenly find yourself in the midst of Fall foliage. Also, in this issue are several pieces related to network communications available at IUP. We hope that many alumni will be interested in making contact with the faculty or Carol and will become registered in our alumni database. Last, but certainly not least, there are letters from alumni to keep you up to date on what is happening out in the real world.

I hope you find at least some of the Fall issue of The Debugger interesting. We have attempted to put a variety of articles together for you. For the future, I urge you to consider writing an article for the Spring issue; it will certainly cut down on my nagging if you do.

In the Spring issue, I hope to have Kerim add a few notes so you get the student's perspective about editing, as well as my own.

Jim Wolfe            Kerim Akgonul

Editor               Student Editor

Gary Buterbaugh

Fall has arrived at IUP. We had a gorgeous October, but the cold of November has set in this morning. And so it has been with the semester. We got through registration, drop-add and even midterms, but now the "cold" of the semester has set in and we are busy with the routine. All too soon the Thanksgiving-Christmas rush will be upon us.

It has been really great to have Jim Wolfe back from educational leave. We've put him hard at work as you can see. Besides taking over the editorship of The Debugger, he has been work-ing with our programming team (he just accompanied them to the national compe-tition) and he is busy developing his courses and doing other valuable things around the department.

John Cross is on sabbatical this semester doing work with the Soft-ware Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh. He stops by a couple of times per week and all the other faculty envy him for the chance to get away.

Mary Micco has been away a couple of times present-ing lectures on her research work and just generally being busy. Tia Watts spends a good amount of time on her dissertation and seems to be making good progress. Charley Shubra went off to receive some training in databases as he looks forward to the chore of converting the Database courses from CP-6 to VMS. Tom Cunningham has become the resident expert on E-mail and Bulletin Boards, etc. and seems to be burning the mid-night oil more than usual. Both Jim Maple and John Sweeney have been considering the possibility of retirement, but it looks like both will hang in there a couple of more years. I guess Kathy McKelvey and Bill Oblitey are just enjoying all the extra money they got as a result of their promotions.

I have made good progress on my dissertation and hope to defend my overview later this semester and if all goes well to get the degree in April. (For those of you who may not know, I am working on a PhD in Admin-istrative and Policy Studies (Higher Education) at the University of Pittsburgh.) I am busy doing a bunch of other things including running a study group to help some student friends of mine with their study skills.

The department hosted our Corporate Advisory Board several weeks back and things went well. We had to cancel the seminars we had scheduled for high school teachers because of a lack of response. Our Educa-tional Advisory Board will meet probably in January.

Not many of you alumni made it to the tent we had at Homecoming, but it was good to see those who did. It's always good to get to see some of the alumni.

Speaking of alumni, what happened to the plans for those of you in Washington to get together? A dinner again at the Samurai Japan-ese Steak House would be great! And how about the plans of the Mellon Bank people to set up something for the Pittsburgh alumni?

I am looking into sell-ing advertising space in the newsletter for companies that might want to get their story across to the 1,000 to 1,200 who receive it. This would enable us to pay for the cost of duplication and mailing - quite an expense.

We are just beginning to think of planning for our annual spring awards ban-quet. If you would like to be invited (of course all students and faculty are automatically invited), just let us know. If your company would be interested in providing a door prize, also let us know. It will be scheduled for sometime in April.

Well, guess that all the news from this end.

Rob Walls, Alumnus 1987

Howdy, y'all, from Fort Worth, Texas. Because of the scarcity of articles from alumni, I decided to break down and submit one myself. This article will be unlike most, because I do not program COBOL and JCL on an IBM mainframe. You see, I work in the defense industry (Sorry, Dr. Tompkins), designing and implementing C software for large systems on UNIX workstations.

I am currently a Senior Computer Systems Engineer at General Dynamics' Fort Worth division, and have recently passed my four year mark. The F-16 Fighting Falcon and parts of the F-22 ATF are manufactured at GD/FW. Much of the computer engineering at the division involves Avionics and weapon systems development, but also includes support functions such as Flight Simulation, Trainers, CAD/CAM and C³I. The group I work in is responsible for ground-based mission planning and support systems for the F-16.

The primary task of my group is a large system called the Data Transfer Cartridge Loader/Reader (DTC L/R). The DTC L/R enables a pilot to choose various avionics initialization parameters, including route plan, communication channels and weapon load, and encode the data on a special cartridge, which can then be read by the aircraft avionics. The system can also retrieve post-flight maintenance data written to the cartridge by the aircraft. The DTC L/R system is housed on a 68020-based minicomputer running UNIX and written entirely in C. A network of Sun workstations is used for preparation of requirement documents using Frame Maker, a document processing package. I was a member of several teams designing, implementing and maintaining several versions of DTC L/R code for my first twenty-one months.

Because of my DTC L/R experience, I was selected to be part of a team developing and in-house mission planning technology demonstrator, called MSS2000. The MS2000 allows users to plan multiple flight plans, analyze terrain-masked threat data, view digital maps and imagery, view generated 3D scenes and load a DTC. The system is platformed on a Silicon Graphics, Inc. high powered graphics worksta-tion and utilizes a Graphical User Interface and an event-driven architec-ture. I was part of the team responsible for the Avionics Initialization por-tion, porting some DTC L/R code and writing new code, including a graphical stores load, allowing me to learn SGI's Graphics Library.

The MSS200 effort was completed about two years ago, and ever since, I have been working on an Independent Research & Development (IRAD) program, exploring automated Target Area Planning. Target Area Planning of weapons delivery and tactics (maneuvers) for an aircraft against a target, from ingress through egress. My GL experience enabled me to develop a sophisticated multi-ship graphical Tactics Editor prototype, with accompanying Weapons Delivery software, involving hundreds of calculations and table lookups. Fortunately, I've had an SGI Personal Iris on my desk to give me the freedom to develop without hinderance. I am currently in the process of converting the NEWS-based user interface borrowed from the MS2000, to use X/11 windows and Motif. X/11 is fast becoming the standard for GUI development with Motif and the most popular widget set and windows managers. My IRAD wraps up this year, so I'm hoping I can put my experience to work for some other program within the group.

I must say, I enjoy working in the defense industry, even through its recent ups and downs. It's a great career for a Computer Science graduate wishing to pursue a technical career, unfortunately, the opportunities are slim right now. A good direction for new graduates is into the engineering workstation market. For anyone wanting a technical career, I suggest taking the UNIX/C course as well as Compiler Construction, Systems Programming and/or Operating Systems, and try to become familiar with the activities in the industry.

Good Luck to Future Graduates! Bye for now.

Paul Grieggs, ISCC

In January 1991 IUP's networks became part of the Internet. The Internet is a world wide collection of inter-connected networks that run the Department of Defense TCP/IP protocol suite. This protocol suite provides user services, including remote login (Telnet), file transfer (FTP), Unix "R" utilities, Network File System (NFS), Talk, and mail. These utilities can be run with cooperating Internet Hosts throughout the world. IUP is running the Multinet TCP/IP package from TGV Corporation. This article takes a brief look at our Internet connection, and explains how to use some of these utilities.

PREPnet - our regional network.

The Internet is a collection of networks. At the most local level, IUP operates a Local Area network of several DEC VAX computers. To connect to the Internet, we placed a TCP/IP gateway on our network. This gateway attaches our Ethernet to a PREPnet Hub gateway in Pittsburgh, PA. The connection operates over a 56KB digital leased line. PREPnet (Pennsylvania Research and Economic Partnership Network) operates a network of T1 (1.5MB/sec) lines and TCP/IP gateways throughout the state of Pennsylvania. On a regional level, PREPnet provides the networking infrastructure to enable Pennsylvania universities, governments, and private businesses to communicate among each other.

The PREPnet connection to the "rest of the world" is a connection to National Science Foundation's NSFnet. NSFnet is considered the nationwide backbone of the Internet. NSFnet is the backbone that connects regional networks throughout the United States. The NFSnet, along with some of the regional networks, also provide links to networks outside the United States. Since all of these connected networks use the same communication protocols (TCP/IP), systems on these networks are able to commu-nicate with one another.

User Benefits - TCP/IP Applications.

The three most widely supported applications on the Internet are Mail, Telnet, and FTP. Since IUP has been a member of BITnet for several years, many of our current users and graduates are familiar with wide area network mail. The VAX/VMS systems at IUP are set up with automatic mail routing software. Because of this, users at IUP continue to use the netmail%"user@host" mail addressing. The mail routing software identifies the host and choose a route over BITnet or the Internet.

Telnet is a remote terminal facility. It enables a user to actually "login" with an interactive session on an Internet host. To login to a remote host from our VMS systems, use the command:

$ telnet

   host.subdomain1.

       subdomain2.domain

where "host" is the host name of the target system, for example OAK; "sub-domains" are administrative entities that control networks, an example of a local subdomain (subdomain1) is GROVE; subdomain2 is usually named for the institution sponsoring the network, an example is IUP; "domain" is the high level authority to which the host belongs, examples are .EDU for educational institu-tions, .COM for commercial businesses, and .MIL military organizations.

If you attempt to login to a system that is not public, you require a user id and password on the target system. However, many systems offer public access, much like our IUPTOMUS library system. These systems may not require a user ID or Password.

An FTP session is opened much the same way a telnet session. From DCL, this command syntax would be used:

$ ftp

    host.subdomain1.

       subdomain2.domain

You receive a connect message when you are connected to the target host. Most target systems require a username, and some require a password. On systems that allow public access, the Internet convention is to have an "anonymous" user name that allows access to the public files on the target system. After you have connected and entered a username, a variety of FTP commands are available to examine directories and files and to transfer files. One tip for using FTP is that many of the target systems are using the UNIX operating system. Consequently, user names, file names and directory names are case sensitive. If you are not sure of a user name, use lower case.

If you have read this far, your biggest question is probably; where do I get host names for telnet and FTP. One of the biggest problems of the Internet is the lack of centralized directory of resources. The best way to find Internet resources is through the "oral tradition"; ask a friend or colleague. Some have tried to document the resources on the Internet. There are files such as LIBRARIES.TXT (a list of Libraries that are reachable from the Internet, available from BOOTES.UNM.EDU) and ftp-list (sites offering anonymous ftp, available from pilot.njin.net). VAX-NOTES conferences also provide references to certain files that a host has made available for anonymous FTP.

Access to the Internet is available to all current mainframe computing users at IUP. It is a service that requires responsible use on the part of the IUP user community. Alumni who work in locations having access to BITNET or the Internet can feel free to use these capabilities to keep in touch with current students, faculty or other friends that remain at IUP. Elec-tronic mail services are an inexpensive and effective way to maintain friendships across the miles.

C. Miller		CAMILLER
J. Cross		JACROSS
T. Cunningham	TPC
J. Maple		JMAPLE
M. Micco		MICCO
C. Shubra		CJSHUBRA
T. Watts		TIAWATTS
J. Wolfe		JLWOLFE

Tom Cunningham

Hi:

I am trying to develop a file containing both the E-Mail and S-Mail (S as in Snail) addresses of the IUP Computer Science graduates and faculty who are also on "the network".

If you do not object to having information about you included in my file for other alumni and faculty to access, please E-Mail the following information to me.

Name (and Maiden Name, if appropriate)

Month & Year of Graduation

Business Title

Business Address

Business Phone

Home Address

Home Phone

If you have the E-Mail address of any other alumnus, would you please forward it to me. I will then send this message to them, hoping to add them to my file.

About once a month, I will mail out the list of E-Mail addresses that I have. I'm not sure how I am going to handle the S-Mail addresses. If you want a copy of the file I will gladly E-Mail it to you. I hope to find a better way of distributing this information as the list becomes larger.

Sergio Rivera, Alumnus 1991
Bitnet: SOR@NCCIBM1

There is not doubt about it. College life has been the best time I have had for the period of three consecutive years. IUP and in particular the Computer Science department bring back lots of good memories of when I was a student like most of you. I was one of the many foreign students who majored in Compsci and graduated in three years; smart???... NO!!! way, just dedicated and conscious of the fact that getting a solid education that would enable me to get a good job.

Not too long ago, I was sitting in some of the classes you are probably in now taking notes and listening to lectures given by some of our distinguished Compsci professors. Some of this classes were boring, while others were very interesting and challenging. That meant spending lots of hours in the lab completing programs or doing some kind of operating system or computer architecture assignments; this was hard but productive work. Perhaps, to some of you the idea of of taking courses beyond the ones required by our core program, has not really come through your heads because of the amount of work that some of these classes may demand. Obviously you should not let yourselves be intimidated or scared by the idea that more work means less fun. Instead think of it in terms of the knowledge that you will gain that would put you one step above your friend who opted to go the easy way.

You should take advantage of the "special topic" courses that are offered by our department or occasions because of their importance, if you are interested on going to graduate school or plan to engage in some type of scientific work. After all, Computer Science is an ample field; should you decide to continue on to a graduate program, make sure you have fulfilled the basic requirements of the school you plan to attend.

So far, I may have bored you to death!! When I was asked to write an article for The Debugger, I promised my friend Kerim, the student editor in charge, to write about my post education experience. Anyway, I graduated from IUP last May and got a job with American Management Systems in Arlington VA. At the time the job offer came along, I always wanted to continue a master degree, but unfortunately I was accepted to a graduate program which did not offer me any financial aid whatsoever. Therefore, the job was my second alternative, a good decision which I don't regret. Nontheless, there have been a whole series of adjustments I have gone through in order to get use to this new life style. Living in a new city, budgeting my own money, and meeting the supervisors expectations is totally a different ball game to the one I was used to while at IUP. Sometimes, just getting out of bed early enough to make it to work on time can be a pain in the a..., if you are used to sleeping in. But of course, these are minor things if we consider the real value or meaning of working and getting job experience.

So... What do I do at AMS?. Let me put it this way my friends. What I currently do, is something I would not like to do for the rest of my life!!! I work with COBOL... yes, the old COBOL, JCL and REPORTER, a powerful piece of AMS software, on a IBM platform using TSO, CICS and other IBM "goodies". I write designs, programs and make enhancements to existing software upon request from our clients. The unit I work for has developed a financial system made up of various subsystems such as accounts payable, receivables and others. The true challenge, however is being able to put all these subsystems together and understand what's going on.

Jim Wolfe

This year's ACM East Central Regional Program-ming Contest was held in Indianapolis on November 2. As usual, IUP, through the Computer Science Club and with the support of the Foundation for IUP, sent a team to compete. This year's team was selected from a small group of students who expressed interest in competing. The team consisted of Kevin Fizz, Chad Dionis, and Jim Morgan. Tia Watts and I were the coaches for the team.

Throughout much of October, the team and coaches met and practiced on problems from previous contests so that Kevin, Chad, and Jim could get used to the nature of the problems and develop strategies for solving them. These practices went quite well.

This contest was typical of ACM, six problems to solve in five hours, working in either Pascal or C. There were a total of 89 teams from 63 colleges and universities competing.

I saw the problems soon after the contest was offi-cially under way. When I read them over, I thought our team should have a good chance at four of the problems. One other problem was stated in a confusing way; and another relied heavily on knowledge of numerical methods.

As things turned out, our team solved two of the problems by the midpoint of the contest. I was very impressed by this. However, the team was not able to solve any of the other problems by the time the contest ended. They came close on one other problem and had partially solved the numerical problem. This too was impressive because only four teams managed to solve the numerical problem at all. Only three teams solved the problem that was stated in a confusing way -and they solved it in the last five minutes of the contest.

When all was said and done, the IUP team ranked 35th out of 89, beating half of the teams which included a graduate student. There was only one other SSHE

university that was represented at the contest; Clarion ranked 62nd. The winners were the team from Michigan State; they were the only team to solve all six problems.

You can become a charter member of the IUP Computer Science Department's Century Club. Membership in the Century Club is obtained by pledging at least $100 to be given through the Foundation for IUP for the Computer Science Department.

If the department could get just 100 of our over 1200 graduates to partici-pate, this would give us at least $10,000 each year (probably substantially more since most companies give matching gifts and some match 2,3 or 4 to 1). A pledge of $100 is less than $10 per month.

Please consider this opportunity. To join cut off the form in the left column, complete it and commit yourself to giving $100 for the 1992 calendar year.