All posts tagged: COMPO

1978-1981: from Sherbrooke to Switzerland

I found this job at the computer centre of the Université de Sherbrooke, having responded to an ad in the newspaper La Presse. It wasn’t quite “in my field” if there was such a thing after the experience of developing COMPO and the map-making software, and I found that the best part of it was the few hours a week I had to be at the “consulting desk” solving people’s problems. This was an IBM 360 installation, and even that was relatively new to me, but in a sense it was all about trying to figure out what they were trying to do, and find in the manuals the description of their instructions. I even learned basic computer operations, mounting magnetic tapes and disk packs, so it was fun to be around. In the late spring, the director of the Math department came to ask if I could teach a summer class to substitute a professor suddenly unable to do it. I had given them a seminar on the Pascal language, and the class was …

1978: COMPO, a Phototypesetting System

That was the title of my Master’s Thesis. It was written in French, at the Université de Montréal. It’s on microfilm at the University’s library (I’m not sure if I kept a copy, in all my moves!). Here’s a paper I wrote in French about it, in which you can see examples of what it did: My advisor hadn’t been too pushy or specific about what to do, and he was going to spend the year away on sabbatical… I guess that was a good way to let me be creative, even though I didn’t know that word at the time. Self-expression, self-determination, and even self-esteem weren’t part of my upbringing, and I had been told to be quiet early on as a child. But I had chosen this advisor, Paul Bratley, at first because in a presentation of the department’s professors, he had the most interesting field of interest. I shyly knocked on his door, intimidated by his look (what was it? His facial expression said I could be boring), and said I found …