My first major contact with Glen came shortly after he joined the ECE Department. Jorge Fontana and I were assigned the teaching of the lab for the Network Theory class using the on-line system on the RW-400. I was immediately enthralled with the power of the system, and embarked on a several year campaign to use the system to teach complex-variable-based topics to engineering students. When we started we had only two or three stations in a long skinny room next to the third floor computer room, which meant a lot of lab sessions with two students per console. Before long, we had a 16 station classroom next door in 3120 with the big storage display scopes, and life became much easier.
In those days, before IC op amps and active filters came into use, analog circuit analysis and synthesis was an extremely mathematically intensive task, and many engineering students floundered badly trying to learn how to do those tasks. The visualization that the OLS provided changed all that, and the increased rate with which students developed intuition and understanding of the subject was astounding.
The next summer, if my memory is right, I was hired by Glen to work with an architect, Phil Hendren, who wanted to use the brand new Grafacon with the IBM 1800, which had been designed as a process control computer. In parallel, Glen was starting the design of the first of many implementations of an on-line system for signal processing of both analog and digital data. Although Glen didn't appear to have a TYPE A personality, his work habits at that time would have put most workaholics to shame. He came in at 3 or 4 am and worked until hunger drove him out at 8 or 9 (usually 9) Phil and I would jump on the machine and work until hunger drove us off at maybe 1 p.m. Glen would then get back on, and I have no idea when he stopped, because no matter how late I stayed he was still going strong.
The final remembrance I want to share is my image of Glen wandering through the hall of the third floor, like a modern pied piper, trailing grad students galore who were eagerly scooping the pearls of wisdom that were continually falling all over the place.
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