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Begun in Little Portugal, Toronto- finished at home many hours later.
We're winding down today from an amazing night of music last night, which I'll get to posting about once all the photos get sorted, but I did want to continue the story from the other day about how The Fates, Gods and Unfaeries were all dead set against me getting into law school and starting to do what I've been doing for the past 35 years.
Sometime in late summer 1980, my Board scores came- good but not great. (The last post maybe explains the "not great" part.) Still not entirely all-in on this quest, I picked a mere four law schools to try applying to, based on very limited knowledge of reputations, finances and future prospects. All were within New York State. To the west, UB, or as it was then clumsily going as, SUNYABFOLAJ.1 (I'll footnote that, eventually.2) Closer to my original home, NYU and Columbia at opposite ends of Manhattan. Last but least likely, Cornell itself; it could fill its first year class with undergrad applicants already on campus, and of course didn't. (Had I started this quest a year or two sooner, I could have applied to a six-year BA/JD program through Cornell's Arts College designed to select the bulk of those nearby undergrads, but alas I missed that boat.)
I remember applying to all four. Cornell sent the promptest and most expected "no thanks." NYU soon followed. Columbia was nice enough to waitlist me. Other than those terminal facts, I remember nothing about their applications. UB's, on the other hand, I remember intimately- precisely because a terminal was involved.
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I learned computer programming on punch cards.
(If it weren't for zinc oxide, you wouldn't have that high speed card reader ::ding!::)
Ah, but this was 1980. The Dark Ages were ending. The Mac was probably in development- not at Apple, but at Xerox, who never made a dime off their technology- and IBM was already preparing to transition from their building-size mainframes to machines that would fit in a workplace room, if not on your desk: Big Blue’s proposal to personalize its big HAL-style mainframes was something called CMS:
CMS (Conversational Monitor System) is a product that comes with IBM's VM/ESA operating system and allows each of many simultaneous interactive users to appear to have an entire mainframe computer at their personal disposal. Almost as old as IBM's MVSoperating sysem, VM/ESA (generally known as "VM") and CMS originated at IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center in 1964. VM provides an extra layer of programming below an operating system, called the control program that handles the actual machine operation of the computer. The control program lets each operating system, such as MVS and CMS, appear to be in sole charge of the computer - effectively, creating a virtual machine . CMS goes a step further and lets each CMS user appear to have their own personal operating system.
From the University’s giant computing building located miles off campus near Tompkins County International Airstrip, it ran tentacles to campus offices and a handful of computer labs, with CRT monitors and Decwriter printers simulating your having your own almost personal computer- years before that term would become popular.
I probably discovered these either in my one Computer Science course- the one with the punch cards- or down in the computing lab of Uris Hall where the interactive PLATO machine resided for my ill-fated ear training for Music Theory I. They really did simulate the soon-to-come DOS-like environment reasonably well; you entered a login and password, and got a menu of options, which allowed you to write or run your own code, or just plain text in primordial Word-y files, save them to and retrieve them from the mainframe, and maybe, if you Knew A Guy, get access to computer games and programs that would let you make posters of Snoopy saying things on a 5-foot-wide sign.
Like that.
Actual employees at Cornell used the full power of CMS for varied applications. I was high-up enough in the dining-hall food chain to have access to the meal planning and forecasting program. My boss Dick Grout's login was "y4t" and his password was "hock." Yes, I still remember that; "strong passwords" were clearly many decades away. Student users were kept behind virtual velvet ropes and only allowed to access portions of the Big Brain, through an operating system known as SCMS; the first S stood for "subset" or "student." I forget which- along with whatever my login and password were. It was mostly simple programs and Super Star Trek for me, but this one night, in the business school computer lab,....
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I brought UB's application with me. All of this was done by snail mail and typed paper back then. I had one, and only one, application form to fill in and send back; driving to Amherst for a replacement was out of the question, given time, finances and the fact that I was then driving a deathtrap of a 1971 Ford that would die on its first trip up there after I got admitted and re-die many times more over my first law school semester.
So I wanted to get it right. The fill-in-the-blank sections were easy enough, and I likely did those on my trusty Smith-Corona electric. But then there was the essay. I couldn't tell you the subject, or how I chose to approach it. I do remember it would fit on one page of that precious original application form. From that came the Brilliant Idea: I would code it into my SCMS account, save it as essay.txt (I think the system presaged the eventual DOS filename and type structure), print it on the green-and-white DECwriter paper, proofread the living crap out of it, make the needed corrections, and when it was ab-fab, I'd put the actual application page in (by now, printers had adjustable rollers you could substitute for the Godzilla toilet paper stock), hit print, and impress the shit out of John Henry Schlegel or whichever admissions guru would be reviewing things.
Which I did, that night, in that exact order, burning the oil in Malott Hall, at roughly 11:59 p.m.
You may ask: why, if I don't remember the subject, or the response, or the date, or much of anything else, do I remember that time so well?
Go back up to that mumbo jumbo at the top. This "virtual machine" was really just channeling an infinitesmally small portion of the massive computing power of an IBM mainframe probably bigger than your or my elementary school. And one of the things it was apparently programmed to do, at the stroke of midnight every night, was to stop everything it was doing and tell Dave in the Master Control Room that a new day had virtually dawned and that everything was A-O-K.
This manifested itself on my one and only available application page in the middle of a paragraph, by stopping what I was saying, scrolling up three lines, printing the magic words that looked something like
VM370/168 CMS v. 79.13.21 YYYY/MM/DD 00:00:00 SYSTEM NORMAL
and then going on with whatever it was I had told it to print.
Insert more than seven words you can't say on television. (The case about that was barely a year or two old at the time, but I knew about it, and all seven of the words.) I was well and truly third-worded. I had an unsubmittable page of an application.
Do I remember what I did? No. Can I guess? This is my best: I suspect I was saved by Xerox- the very company that was, at that very moment, being third-worded out of its corporate future by Steve Jobs having stolen technology from its west coast research facility just a year before. (Or not.)
I'm pretty sure that I just cleaned up my vomit, reprinted the essay on a clean sheet of letter-sized paper, scissor-and-scotch-taped it over the HAL-itosised page which I then tore from the application book, put it and the preceding or following page on a reliable old Xerox 914, threw in a shitload of dimes, and stapled them into the package and hoped UB wouldn't notice.
They didn't- or didn't care. I got in. In fact, they wanted me so badly, they wouldn't defer my admission when I had weeble-wobbles about it several months later. That's Part III of this two-part story, which isn't nearly as interesting and which I may never tell. But after the kerfuffle on the law boards and now this, it certainly makes everything I've accomplished in the almost 40 years since seem much more deserved.
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1 From its founding in 1847 until its takeover by SUNY in 1962, UB was simply the University of Buffalo, and its constituent law school simply Buffalo Law School or UB Law School. By the late 70s, academicians and acronymophiles had gotten involved, and UB had grown to SUNYAB, not to be confused with SUNYBSC across town or any of the other 60 SUNYs. The Law School became the Faculty of Law and Jurisprudence, one of six Faculties which made up SUNYAB's Hexangle of Doom logo from the era. Legend has it that the FOLAJ was intended to be divided into a School of Law AND a School of Jurisprudence, but then the state ran out of money about a week before running out of shitty ideas.
2 See? Told you I would;)
