Culler Tales

R K Cralle

Culler vs. CHP

Glenn and I were members of a carpool in the middle 50s commuting from Berkeley to Lawrence Livermore National Lab daily (LLNL, now, but Ernest Orlando Lawrence Radiation Lab, E. O. LRL in those days). (Glenn was a two en Glenn then.) In those days highway 50 (now 580) had abutting side streets with boulevard stops accessing it. One morning on a day when Glenn was driving he rolled through one of these boulevard stops (what was/is a "California stop") while connecting with highway 50 and was immediately pulled over by a highway patrolman and ticketed for failure to come to a complete stop.

A few days later when I was driving the carpool along highway 50, Glenn noticed a CHP officer ahead of us rolling through the same boulevard stop sign on to highway 50, for which Glenn had being given a ticket a short time ago. Glenn said to me, "Pull him over!" Which I did. As the four of us piled out of my car and started back to the officer's car, he didn't know whether to call for help or draw his gun. He rolled down his window and Glenn said, "I got a ticket for failure to stop at that stop sign that you just rolled through." Sheepishly, the officer said, "I thought I stopped, I'll try to do better." I thought for sure Glenn was going to say, "See that you do!" But he didn't. As we drove off I said to Glenn, "You know, if my license plate is ever so slightly off center or crooked, he's going to arrest me!" But he didn't and we drove on to the lab, very cocky and pleased.

Culler vs. RPN

There is an old tale about a woodsman who came down from the mountains and was complaining to a hardware store owner that he, with his bucksaw, could only cut 10 cords of wood a day now; whereas, he used to cut 15 cords a day. The store owner said, "Why don't you try this super chainsaw?" So, the woodsman bought the chainsaw and returned to the mountains. A few days later he returned with the chainsaw to the hardware store and said to the store owner, "I don't know what's wrong. With your saw I can only cut five cords of wood a day." The owner took the chainsaw from the woodsman and started it by pulling on the starter cord--VAROOOM! The woodsman said, "WHAT was that!?"

Sometime after the Culler-Fried terminal was in existence, Glenn and I were talking about parsing algebraic expressions. I mentioned the Polish logician Lukasiewitz'(SP) invention of parenthesis free notation (in 1950), now called reverse polish notation, or RPN. I said isn't RPN neat. Glenn said, "WHAT was that?"

The point being that although Glenn knew/knows voluminous amounts of mathematics and computing, he didn't know all of the up-to-date computer science. I believe what we called a stack, he called a "roll-back" or something like that. His unique mind just invented whatever he needed, when he needed it

Culler vs. Challenges

I don't believe Glenn could ever resist a challenge:

• Betcha can't break fishline with your bare hands. He could and did. (His hands didn't care for the result!)

• Betcha can't knock a cork out of an unopened bottle of wine using just your fist. He did, squirting wine all over his pants.

• Betcha won't hold your little finger in the bung hole of a hand crank ice cream maker while someone cranks. He did, as the records at a certain emergency room would verify.

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