Cliff and I would go the Bear's Lair and play at the arcade. Not constantly but a few times a week. I like playing two player games so those are the ones we usually played. Steel Gunner and Terminator 2 and CyberBall. CyberBall takes 6 quarters per player to play a full game. Two-minute periods (with an additional 15 seconds per player above 1, though the time ticks off faster than normal I think) with three periods per half. You get money for scoring and good plays which can be used to buy better players. Your players will also blow up if they take enough damage. We were about the same skill so it always seemed like I was only winning every other game. We sucked though, as the couple of times we played against real Cyberball players can attest.

There were two big disasters this year, I guess to make up for the quiet year the year previous. My Freshman Year we had the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which although it's arguably more famous than these two disasters it went by too fast for me to appreciate. Thirty seconds and then it's over and the damage is hard to appreciate if you don't drive around the Bay Area.

In the Fall of 1989 there was the Oakland Hills Firestorm. Remember Jim and Darren and Brett, who got an apartment right above the Caldecott Tunnel entrance? Well, the fire started right there, so their place was the first to burn down, taking my old vaccuum cleaner with it. But I would only find out about it later. For the most part it was a "Hey look! There's a big fire on the hill!" sort of event. From Cliff's window we had a good view of the hills and the fire slowly creeping forward until we started to get worried that it would hit Berkeley. Unlike the Earthquake it didn't seem like a big deal so I didn't call home and apparently my parent were worried ("You mean this is on the Sacramento news?").

The other disaster (which I guess most people would not categorize it as such) was the Rodeny King riots. In Los Angeles it was much worse, there it was a protest that got out of control. In Berkeley it was just an opportunity to go looting and trash the Gap (for some reason, the Gap always seems to get trashed in every riot). It was really quiet that night. Every place was boarded up in anticipation and police were in force. Even the Bear's Lair was closed so Cliff and I couldn't play video games. Come to think of it, it wasn't much of an event at all.

It was the Fall of 1991 when I finally started taking upper division CS courses. It just seemed more appropriate to me that you should wait until you're a junior before taking the upper division courses, one reason why I didn't take them the previous semester. Computer Science 150, 170 and Math 128A were the classes I took, totalling 14 units. I got an A in CS 150, a B+ in CS 170, and an A- in Math 128A, not bad.

CS 150 -- Components and Design Techniques for a Digital System. A five unit class with lab work taught by Professor Randy Katz. Professor Katz is one of the better teachers in the department, a really likeable fellow. His main claim to fame is being part of the research team that developed the RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, though now the acronym has changed a bit since RAID is usually done with more expensive hard drives rather than the cheap ones) concept. Professor Katz has also won some national awards for his teaching excellence.

In any case, the class was learning about microchips and circuit design. We each had a TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) catalog that listed all the CMOS TTL chips made by some big manufacturer, along with the circuit layout and what they did and the part numbers. The labs were about playing with our breadboards and circuits, using an oscilloscope and programming a PLA (Programmable Logic Array).

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