I had Professors David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel for a really great undergraduate class. Later, to satisfy some undergraduate EE research requirement I did

I had Professors David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel for a really great undergraduate class. Later, to satisfy some undergraduate EE research requirement I did some work for Dr. Hubel. Hubel and Wiesel went on to win the Nobel prize for their research on the origin of visual perception in 1981. It all sounds like a great story to tell my kids except for one thing: I didn't end up helping them in their research even one tiny bit. All I ended up doing was extreme command-line bullshittery for a semester trying to get a PDP-9 (an 18bit machine!) to talk to a system with some home-brew crt-to-film based output device. Everything had to be coded in low level assembly language and even booting up the PDP-9 in a dark lab was intimidating for someone starting out in CS, not to mention the strange hardware it was hooked up to ("flip this switch but not until the power supply to the film writer stabilizes", etc.) In the end, Dr. Hubel couldn't have been more understanding, and it ended up as a good experience for me. Not because I did anything productive but because I had a sympathetic professor. Today, I've been programming computers for almost half a century and it's been great. I'm so grateful for the teachers, professors, co-workers and colleagues that have helped me over the rough spots, command-line bullshittery, and my own ignorance over the decades. It's nice to hear the concern Dr. Guo has for his students in the originally cited article (despite the frustration it ends up causing for him).