An anniversary presentation
In July 2009, when the Department of Computers celebrated its fortieth anniversary, I tried to summarise in a presentation the first twenty years of my own activity within that academic community: from my appointment as an assistant lecturer on 16 March 1970 to my departure from Romania on 30 August 1989.
I gave it the title Et in Arcadia ego…, an elliptical formula with no verb. At the time, the phrase had for me a rather pessimistic tone, at best a nostalgic one, but I now feel that I did not yet grasp its full range of possible meanings. Many of those who had built the department were still present in the lecture hall, alongside the generations that had continued their work. The institution had changed, but the community still seemed alive and recognisable.
Seen today, the photographs taken that day and during the mountain excursion organised for the anniversary by my friend Nicolae Tăpuș, then head of the Department, acquire another meaning. They no longer document only a celebration; they preserve the image of an academic world that no longer exists: a world with its own hierarchies and rivalries, enduring friendships, professors who spent much of each day together in the department, and students who sometimes became their professors’ colleagues.
I did not set out to write an official history of the department. I chose a personal perspective: the courses I created, the projects on which I worked, the books that shaped me, and the colleagues and students with whom I shared those years. The page now preserves a second layer of memory as well: the moment in 2009 when we came together to evoke the department’s first forty years.
Forty years later
The celebrations in July 2009 brought together in the lecture hall former and current members of the Department of Computers, former graduates of Automatic Control, and friends of the department. My presentation, Et in Arcadia ego…, was one of the recollections prepared for this anniversary gathering.
The photographs capture both the moment when I was speaking about the years 1970–1989 and my role as a participant listening to my colleagues’ presentations. Several generations of the same academic community were gathered in the hall.
From the founding to my departure
The Department of Computers had been established in the autumn of 1969. That year, following a competition for a Professor Assistant position, I had joined Professor Corneliu Penescu’s department and, like several other colleagues, I was transferred to the newly established department. For bureaucratic reasons, my first working day there was 16 March 1970, several months after its ufficial establishment. ((see A new Department at Politehnica University)
During the first years, I conducted seminars and laboratory sessions for the courses Digital Computers, at the Faculty of Electronics, taught by Professor Adrian Petrescu, and Digital Computer Programming, at the Faculty of Automatic Control, taught by Professor Petre Dimo. In 1972, I became responsible for a new course in Computer Programming at the Faculty of Automatic Control, and from 1975 onwards I taught, for the first time at the Polytechnic Institute, the courses Automata Theory and Formal Language Theory, in their classical, mathematical form.
In 1980, I defended my doctoral thesis, An ALGOL-Oriented Conversational System, and began teaching a new course in Programming Languages and Compilers. The chronology of the presentation ends on 30 August 1989, the day I left Romania.
In 1980 I defended my doctoral thesis, An ALGOL-Oriented Conversational System, and began teaching Programming Languages and Compilers. The chronology in the presentation ends on 30 August 1989, the day I left Romania.
The presentation also establishes the date of the photograph used for the graduation ceremony of the class: April 1989. This reference made it possible to date precisely the gallery of the teachers of the Computer Engineering class, photographed four months before my departure.
Docendo discimus — We learn by teaching (Seneca)
The presentation was not confined to the years 1970–1989. To show the continuity of my teaching activity, I placed side by side the courses taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Ovidius University in Constanța, “La Sapienza” University of Rome and, after 2004, the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages.
Their succession also describes the evolution of the field: from programming, automata, formal languages and compilers to object-oriented programming, systems design, development methods and software architectures. This did not mean abandoning the foundations, but extending them towards the problems involved in building complex systems.
Early research directions
Sisteme formale
Between 1971 and 1979, my courses and research focused on formal semantics, automata theory and formal languages. During this period I supervised a diploma project at the Faculty of Mathematics on the specification of programming-language semantics using the Vienna Development Method and, together with Cristian Mâncaș, developed an LALR(1) parser generator.
Portabilitatea programelor
The study of bootstrap, half-bootstrap and “basic machine” methods led to the implementation of a BCPL compiler and the STAGE-2 macroprocessor. These projects, carried out by teams that included Mariana Necula, Irina Athanasiu and students from the department, represented my first systematic investigations into the transfer of software between platforms.
Compilatoare și sisteme conversaționale
These were followed by the implementation of BCPL on Romanian computers, the LPTR language for specifying real-time processes, and the ALGOL-oriented conversational system developed in my doctoral research with the participation of several students. From this experience emerged, in 1980, my first Programming Languages and Compilers course.
These directions are discussed separately in the sections devoted to program portability and software engineering in 1980–1989.
Colleagues and students
Several slides contain no chronology or diagrams, but photographs. Under the headings Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet and Ubi amici, ibi opes, I brought together images of colleagues, meetings and excursions. Two other slides are devoted to my students and to the class of 1984.
These images convey something that an inventory of projects cannot: research and teaching took place within a community. Some of the people photographed were collaborators in projects; others were students who contributed directly to the implementations, continued the research or later became academics themselves.
The excursion around 1985 was also part of Mircea Petrescu’s effort to keep the department together. Colleagues travelled with their families, and professional relationships could, for a day, continue in a more natural and personal setting. I was accompanied by my family, as were Cristea, Moisa, Tăpuș and other colleagues.
From program design to INTERFORM
From 1979 onwards, the centre of my interests shifted towards modelling program design. One chapter of my doctoral thesis proposed a model of software-product design; it was followed by papers on the abstract machine, design as a systematic activity and the possibility of a CAD/CAM system for software.
In parallel, I worked on protocol validation for computer networks and on the design of programmable-logic controllers. All these attempts shared a common concern: identifying the intermediate representations and operations through which design could be supported by tools.
The INTERFORM project, carried out between 1985 and 1989, brought these ideas together in a software-engineering environment intended to cover the entire life cycle of a software product. Within it, I formulated several propositions that remained central to my later research: the software process is also a business process; the product and the process are multifaceted; development is model-driven; and tools can provide extensive support for the product’s evolution.
The concept of an interform designated a dynamic aggregation of facets — partial models corresponding to the concerns of different participants — describing a product or component at a particular stage of maturity.
The book and the broken thread
The last major result of this line of research appeared after I left Romania: Integrating Tools for Software Development, published by Prentice Hall in 1992 in the Yourdon Computing series. The book synthesised the software-process model, the concepts of object, activity, agent and tool, interforms, and the architecture of an integrated and programmable development environment.
I ended the 2009 presentation with the liberating cry of the Greeks in the Anabasis when they saw the Euxine Sea: Thalassa! Thalassa! For them, the sea meant that the road home had once again become possible. For me, sending the book manuscript to the publisher seemed to mean that I had finally reached the place towards which I had been striving.
Then came the rupture: my departure in 1989 and its unintended consequences. The team and the project could no longer continue in their original form. The book was completed in a different context and appeared in 1992, but its conceptual thread had originated in the Department of Computers. My departure broke the institutional continuity, but not the continuity of the ideas.
See also the page devoted to the book Integrating Tools for Software Development.
The chronology as seen in 2009
The first table in the presentation is also useful as a biographical document. It shows how I described my own path at the time: professor at Ovidius University from 1995 to 2004, adjunct professor at “La Sapienza” from 2003 to 2007, professor at the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages from 2004, and researcher at the CNR from 2006.
In the same table I recorded 2008 as the year in which I became head of the Department of Engineering in Foreign Languages. The presentation therefore confirms that I already held this position in July 2009 and that my term had begun the previous year.
This information will also be used in the future page devoted to FILS. After my retirement in 2012, I continued teaching on an hourly-paid basis until 2023.
A world that no longer exists
The anniversary did not end in the lecture hall. In the same month, July 2009, a mountain excursion was also organised. As on the department’s earlier excursions, colleagues travelled with their families. I appear alone in the group photograph because my family was not in Romania at the time.
The gathering created a direct link between generations. The younger members of the department had the opportunity to meet former members and colleagues of the older generation, among them Cristea, Tăpuș and Moldoveanu. For one day, people belonging to different stages of the same history were together again.
For a moment, time seems suspended and the department’s history appears whole again. It was not, of course, an Arcadia. There were rivalries, injustices, ambitions and ruptures; groups formed that cooperated or confronted one another, and there were enduring friendships as well as resentments that lasted for decades.
Yet there was also a sense of belonging to a professional community built over time around a discipline that was still in its beginnings. Courses, laboratories, research contracts, books and student projects were not isolated activities, but parts of the same academic life.
Seen from today’s distance, that world no longer exists. Institutions have changed their structures and names, the founding generations have disappeared, and the university operates by different rules. A department does not survive only through its administrative form, however. It continues through the people it shaped and through the ideas it planted in them.
In my case, the seed planted by the Department of Computers during my formative years bore fruit. From the courses on automata, languages and compilers, the portability projects and the INTERFORM experience grew my later research in software engineering, the book published by Prentice Hall, and the courses I developed afterwards. My departure broke an institutional thread, but it did not erase what had been formed there.
Perhaps this is, in the end, the meaning of the title Et in Arcadia ego…: not only the awareness that I once belonged to a world that no longer exists, but also the recognition that what this world planted in us continued to live and bear fruit beyond its disappearance.
The full presentation
All twenty-one slides are reproduced below. The images can be opened at full size. For continuous reading, the PDF version is more convenient.
Open the complete presentation gallery
