While most professors at Gavilan College pride themselves on a
lengthy career of working with people, one teacher has spent much
of his career in the company of machines.
Hollister – While most professors at Gavilan College pride themselves on a lengthy career of working with people, one teacher has spent much of his career in the company of machines.
In an era where electronics are judged on the idea that smaller is better, Computer Science instructor Dennie van Tassel, 65, remembers the days of ENIAC machine. The monstrosity built in 1946 was regarded as the first computer and required 1,000 square-feet of floor space. He recalls when Apple started the microcomputer revolution in 1976 and how IBM created the first personal computer in 1981.
He’s a walking, talking encyclopedia of computer knowledge and has worked as a teacher for 38 years. He began his time at Gavilan following the dotcom boom in the late 1990s.
When he started, computer instructors with real world experience were hard to find since many were joining the tech field for the money. But Tassel, a Morgan Hill resident, said he wanted to teach.
Tassel began teaching in 1967 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which had one computer in the entire university: an IBM 1620, with four kilobytes of core memory. By comparison, computers today have more than 1 million times as much memory.
In the early 90s, the university was facing budget short falls and Tassel was forced into early retirement. For the next few years, he became what he called a freeway flyer, a teacher who goes from school to school for his classes. He taught at Hartnell, Cabrillo and West Valley community colleges.
Finally, in 1998, Tassel got a full-time job with Gavilan when computer classes were always filled.
“We could have offered a class at four in the morning and it would be filled,” Tassel said.
The bubble has since burst on the dot coms but Tassel said his classes are still doing well. Students from all different education levels have taken courses from Tassel at Gavilan. He said many of them already have their bachelor’s degrees and some have masters or doctorates.
Tassel began his computer career in the U.S. Marine Corps where his math skills allowed him to take one of two paths: be a mechanic or work in data processing.
He joined the Marines in 1957 right out of high school knowing he might be drafted.
Computers, he said, changed little during the first 20 years of his career: They were big, slow, used punch cards and expensive.
As time went on, computers became more complex, but Tassel has been able to keep up the changes.
“I read technical manuals as if they were novels,” he said.
And though he has experienced the rise of computers in modern life, the professor wonders if things have already gone too far. He fears what he calls “creeping featurism,” that software and hardware will soon collapse with the continual additions. He said he hopes programmers ditch all the unneccessary features and return to simpler programming.
“Many programming environments that started out as useful ways to compile and debug programs,” Tassel said. “Now they have so many features that the software is near unusable by mere mortals that do not want to spend all their time wading through the unwanted features to get to the few features they want.”
