Spectacular Sponsorship Letters: Fill & Download for Free

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Without a doubt, the problem of putting on contests year after year, building on success, raising the bar, and not getting off track are a quadripartite problem that can only be done by thousands of great folks, institutions, companies, and communities working together for a common good.So, why don’t I start in 1984. (I know I’m not talking about contest problem sets, but I’ve been trying to answer these questions for five hours now, so I need a bit of liberty.) I was hooked on the “Scholastic Programming Contest” the first time I saw it in 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Annual Winter Meeting of the ACM Computer Science Conference. UPE was putting it on, giving the prizes, and ACM regional representatives had agreed to recruit contest directors from the 12 geographical regions of ACM that all had a foot in the US and spanned what we called the Free World. I think there were fewer than 1,000 CS faculty at the time.Now in 1984, I had agreed, along with my friend Don Gaitros, both of us at Baylor, and all of our faculty, to put on a regional contest in Austin in conjunction with the 1984 ACM South Central Regional Conference. We do that kind of thing at Baylor, being Texans and all.The contest was to be conducted on microcomputers for the very first time. I was an advocate having used them for teaching and development since their inception. I had tested a new version of Pascal with a neat IDE called “Turbo Pascal”. It was better than mine, so we decided to use it. Denny Frailey of TI and the ACM South Central Regional Representative arranged to provide TI microcomputers running a version of MS-DOS that we offered to the teams at cost of manufacturing. All of them took us up on the offer. I contacted Philippe Kahn, the author of Borland Turbo Pascal, endorsed it, and asked for copies. Philippe gave the software and many prizes to the contest for years to come. Thanks! However, it may have been his brother-in-law who was in charge of marketing who came to the event.Well, you know Marsha Poucher? She has been the ICPC Contest Manager for decades and my wife of 46 years. I’m a work in progress. She is very dedicated. So we had two wonderful daughters, but none had been born at Baylor. So about 9 months before hosting the regional contest… (What? OK? but can I tell the rest of it?)OK. So I knew several months before the November 1984 contest that though I was the Contest Director and the Finals Judges were coming and TI had committed the equipment and Philippe had committed the software and prizes, and Baylor had committed many volunteers (students, staff, faculty), and the reputation of ACM and everyone else was on the line, family comes first. My daughter Melinda was scheduled for delivery about the same time.So, I wrote the first cookbook for a contest where teams had one microcomputer and submissions were made by floppy disk. I designed a dataflow diagram and all of the data products, their flow, and accounting. I provided each person with a role, a written description of their procedures, basically programming the system. It was dubbed “sneaker net”. I had no idea at the time that this would be come the gold standard for contests for years to come.Why? Because, I didn’t think I would be able to come. In fact, the whole group got ready knowing I wouldn’t be there. However, Melinda has always been a most prompt and efficient daughter and an able statesman. She was born a few days before I was to leave. We came home from the hospital one day. My dear mother-in-law, Rea Henderson, was there to take care of Marsha, assisted by her sisters, Elaine and Karen. Marsha agreed and I left the next day for the contest.When I got there, Mark Measures had systems running, Don Gaitros has the judges in good order. All of my colleagues pitched in to run the contest system. I really didn’t have a lot to do other than to entertain the guests, call out the results, and hand out the prizes.The Finals Judges, James Comer and Dick Rinewalt, were impressed. They invited me to join them. And we transformed the finals to the same technology. But what made it special was the Baylor touch. We ran the contest based on visiting my grandmother’s home, Mrs. Monie Carson King, of Pontotoc and Verona, Mississippi.You had to get to grandma’s house. And, you might have to pitch in a little to make everything work well. But you were welcome. You could do no wrong other than to interfere with another. There was no limit to affection. But, you might have to compete a little for attention. And when the visit was over, you wanted to come back.So that is it.There are another forty or so stories.There was the time in New Orleans, 1985, when a colleague had secured computers from the US Army that were Zeniths. They were sweet. A light was out in the ceiling above several of the teams. So 30 minutes before the contest was to start, a maintenance man got on a tall ladder to replace the bulb. It still didn’t work. But, ah ha! There were a pair of dangling wires! He connected them. So 200v went coursing through six machines and fried them. It seems that the US Army had the circuit breakers removed so that they could provide their own power service. Lesson 0: With enough electrical current, everything is a fuse.Fortunately, we had exactly six judges machines. So we gave the six teams the machines (after the power was fixed by disconnecting the wires). And all was well except we could not judge any submissions. In the meantime, I had remembered that there were half a dozen IBM demo machines downstairs in the CSC Exhibit Area. Of course this was at night (6PM to midnight or later back then) and there was a guard, a very kind guard. I true gentleman of the South. Now after discussing matters with him and our concurring that a failed Finals was simply not acceptable in New Orleans, he let the judges come in and use the machines to judge the contest.You know, at the heart of it all, there is such a thing as love of community with all of its faults and failures. So, kudos to our knight in blue. The contest successfully concluded.There was the time that a colleague graciously accepted “NEXT” t-shirts for the contestants even though Apple was the sponsor. I think it was 1987 St. Louis. This was during the time of estrangement between Steve Jobs and Apple. So Apple spends maybe $100K for the contestants to all wear “NEXT” t-shirts? Sure. So I lost them. Of course after the Finals was over, we gave them to the contestants. We keep our commitments but sometimes… BTW, Burt Cummins of Apple sent me a “NEXT” t-shirt, but it was spelled “NEVR”, anyway, I think it was Burt.There was the time that Apple had provided equipment and a colleague was certain that we could handle submission over AppleTalk with a miserable mail system. That was 1888 in Atlanta, Georgia. We had sneaker net as a second contest system (we always have two ways to conduct the World Finals). To avoid embarrassment during testing, I collected the network hardware without approval. It was a bit tense, but the contest worked without a hitch.And then there was AT&T, a great sponsor! It was 1990 and we had the first Finals in which submissions were by Ethernet. Fortunately, we also had Mark Measures. We had the finest workstations running System V UNIX. The 1990 Finals were in Washington, D. C. Now this one was amazing. I had called in favors. Big time. All of us were invited to the White House the day after the contest to tour and then see President George Herbert Walker Bush and wife Barbara in the Rose Garden.We had a great contest! The three major networks agreed to cover part the Finals. They sent TV cameras and news crews. It was spectacular until…They all left just before the contest started. All of them. Not one of them stayed. You see, across the street from the hotel, there was a night club. There was a night club in which a fight broke out. And a knife came out. Triple Murder! Live on all of the news channels.So for the “I was born after the Internet” crowd, its a good thing that there are now a lot of channels and a lot of great reporters that cover the ACM-ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM. Because IBM is a great company at getting the word out about you. A billion press impressions per year is amazing.So back to the contest, the contest succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It ended with accurate results. The next day we all went to the White House and saw the President of the USA. By the way, did you know that President Clinton is a fan? There are many heads of state that think that the world would be a better place if we solved problems more frequently than we created them.OK. That got me to 1990. I’ve written replies now for 6 hours. So I’ll just highlight a few more.The introduction of balloons to bring back the visuals of sneaker net once we handled transactions (still by the Cookbook) over ethernet. Why there are different colored balloons. Why we reduced teams from 4 to 3.1991 San Antonio, what a great contest! CJ Hwang committed to grow the contest in Asia. What a miracle worker.1992 Kansas City, the University of Melbourne wins. Balloons start. Threatened with a $150 per balloon fee for getting them down, I bought a pump b-b gun with a scope, set up a range for Mark Measures, determined the necessary strength to pop the balloon but not embed in the ceiling, demoed one shot, handed Mark the gun and left. There were no fees and no lights knocked out. We were on a budget. At the awards ceremony I was given an incorrect order of finish. I announced that the Harvard team had won $1,000. I financed it. There is such a thing as honor. When they came up, I asked them given the circumstances, wouldn’t they come back the next year and win the championship?1993: Indianapolis, again. In 1982, it was -23 degrees F. Back to 1993. Harvard team wins the World Finals! Congratulations again, Derrick, Tony, and Craig! Now I didn’t go to Harvard. However, my 7th great grandfather Joshua Moodey graduate in 1658. He was a minister of 1st Church Boston. He was offered the job of President of Harvard but turned it down because the students were too rowdy. Must have gotten considerably better since then. OK, OK, ministers keep family records, and back then, four hour sermons. So it’s genetic and the reason that I rarely write.And then there were the Microsoft sponsorship years! What a great company. And Tonya Dressel, convincing “Good Morning America” to give us coverage. However, labeling me the “High Geek of Computing” in the Wall Street Journal was over the top. I still laugh about that. I could only image what my friends thought about that, especially given the work I was doing at the time. Anyway. Shout out.So we are in Nashville, 1995, at the Grand Old Opry Hotel. We are there during the country music awards and all of the stars are chatting us up. We are celebrities! So James Comer is talking to Dolly Parton and I look at the two of him. He is there with his “Director” ribbon, “Judge” ribbon, and ACM badge. ACM. “Academy of Country Music”. Oh well, the celebrity was short lived when they read the fine print, Association for Computing Machinery.OK, let’s wrap this up. There was Philadelphia and then San Jose. During the Awards Ceremony we had a bomb scare. There was the Unibomber. Letter from the FBI. Tonya Dressel, this was your fault!And then we came to 1998, the first year of IBM sponsorship in Atlanta. The ACM ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM. Thanks Brenda Chow, John Swainson, and Steve Mills. We will complete 20 years of sponsorship in 2017. And we have a lot to do to make sure that the ICPC is here for another generation of problem solvers.So, it’s the night before the contest and all is well except my daughters are restless and asked to go take a tour of the hotel and contest area in the middle of the night. “Dad! There was a fork lift trying to get in the contest area! There were posters on all the walls. They aren’t IBM posters, they are Microsoft posters!” So I went down with them and there must have been 100–200 posters everywhere and a fork lift wanting to go through the contest area to put up some more signs. I fixed that.So we spent the next hour or so taking down signs, hundreds of signs. Signs on the walls, in the stair wells, on the doors, even in the rest rooms! It was hilarious! However, it was not the way to start the IBM sponsorship. I kept a couple of them. I gave John Swainson one of them as a souvenir. Do folks love the ICPC. You bet.There was one that I didn’t get. There was a Microsoft banner on the inside door of one of the stalls in the Lady’s Room. There are limits to what I will do as director.So maybe next year, I’ll tell you some really amazing things about contest problems, judging, printing, security, a seriel powerplug puller, and what happened during the 20 years of IBM sponsorship. But I’m pooped.Best,Bill

Repeating text is not cheating. It is reusing natural code. You will have to parse this for the funny stuff. Often the funny stuff is also the most challenging stuff.Of course, there was the time that Ali Orooji was asked to dance the hula. It is etched in my mind. There was the time that I met Steve Bourne who delighted in cleaning the glass in frames that held certificates. I knew we would become friends.There is the continuing plot to kidnap the World Champion Trophy and hold it ransom for a hot tub for the Systems crew. I delivered. They didn’t think that the six inch bowl with a water boiler qualified.There was the time that the Hilton Del Rio in San Antonio told me that they had been concerned about hosting a competition for college students during Spring Break. But, that the group was not only well-behaved, they repaired a number things in the hotel.There was the time that we couldn’t get decent Internet access to the Fairmont in Banff Springs (2008). So some of our guys put up a microwave link at the highest point of the hotel, linked it to a microwave tower on a ridge that provided Internet to the university system and worked out a deal where excess bandwidth turned into cash for the schools and bandwidth for a hotel that sat on a granite rock 1,000 feet in diameter, protected (a good thing) by the park service.There was the Harbin sliding incident. Did you know there is a monument to the ICPC at Harbin Engineering University? If you are ever near the library, you can visit it in the park.There was the time …. Oh well, here is the repeat. I am so sorry if this is boring.Here is the repeat:Without a doubt, the most challenging problem for me is the problem of putting on contests year after year, building on success, raising the bar, and not getting off track are a quadripartite problem that can only be done by thousands of great folks, institutions, companies, and communities working together for a common good.So, why don’t I start in 1984. (I know I’m not talking about contest problem sets, but I’ve been trying to answer these questions for five hours now, so I need a bit of liberty.) I was hooked on the “Scholastic Programming Contest” the first time I saw it in 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Annual Winter Meeting of the ACM Computer Science Conference. UPE was putting it on, giving the prizes, and ACM regional representatives had agreed to recruit contest directors from the 12 geographical regions of ACM that all had a foot in the US and spanned what we called the Free World. I think there were fewer than 1,000 CS faculty at the time.Now in 1984, I had agreed, along with my friend Don Gaitros, both of us at Baylor, and all of our faculty, to put on a regional contest in Austin in conjunction with the 1984 ACM South Central Regional Conference. We do that kind of thing at Baylor, being Texans and all.The contest was to be conducted on microcomputers for the very first time. I was an advocate having used them for teaching and development since their inception. I had tested a new version of Pascal with a neat IDE called “Turbo Pascal”. It was better than mine, so we decided to use it. Denny Frailey of TI and the ACM South Central Regional Representative arranged to provide TI microcomputers running a version of MS-DOS that we offered to the teams at cost of manufacturing. All of them took us up on the offer. I contacted Philippe Kahn, the author of Borland Turbo Pascal, endorsed it, and asked for copies. Philippe gave the software and many prizes to the contest for years to come. Thanks! However, it may have been his brother-in-law who was in charge of marketing who came to the event.Well, you know Marsha Poucher? She has been the ICPC Contest Manager for decades and my wife of 46 years. I’m a work in progress. She is very dedicated. So we had two wonderful daughters, but none had been born at Baylor. So about 9 months before hosting the regional contest… (What? OK? but can I tell the rest of it?)OK. So I knew several months before the November 1984 contest that though I was the Contest Director and the Finals Judges were coming and TI had committed the equipment and Philippe had committed the software and prizes, and Baylor had committed many volunteers (students, staff, faculty), and the reputation of ACM and everyone else was on the line, family comes first. My daughter Melinda was scheduled for delivery about the same time.So, I wrote the first cookbook for a contest where teams had one microcomputer and submissions were made by floppy disk. I designed a dataflow diagram and all of the data products, their flow, and accounting. I provided each person with a role, a written description of their procedures, basically programming the system. It was dubbed “sneaker net”. I had no idea at the time that this would be come the gold standard for contests for years to come.Why? Because, I didn’t think I would be able to come. In fact, the whole group got ready knowing I wouldn’t be there. However, Melinda has always been a most prompt and efficient daughter and an able statesman. She was born a few days before I was to leave. We came home from the hospital one day. My dear mother-in-law, Rea Henderson, was there to take care of Marsha, assisted by her sisters, Elaine and Karen. Marsha agreed and I left the next day for the contest.When I got there, Mark Measures had systems running, Don Gaitros has the judges in good order. All of my colleagues pitched in to run the contest system. I really didn’t have a lot to do other than to entertain the guests, call out the results, and hand out the prizes.The Finals Judges, James Comer and Dick Rinewalt, were impressed. They invited me to join them. And we transformed the finals to the same technology. But what made it special was the Baylor touch. We ran the contest based on visiting my grandmother’s home, Mrs. Monie Carson King, of Pontotoc and Verona, Mississippi.You had to get to grandma’s house. And, you might have to pitch in a little to make everything work well. But you were welcome. You could do no wrong other than to interfere with another. There was no limit to affection. But, you might have to compete a little for attention. And when the visit was over, you wanted to come back.So that is it.There are another forty or so stories.There was the time in New Orleans, 1985, when a colleague had secured computers from the US Army that were Zeniths. They were sweet. A light was out in the ceiling above several of the teams. So 30 minutes before the contest was to start, a maintenance man got on a tall ladder to replace the bulb. It still didn’t work. But, ah ha! There were a pair of dangling wires! He connected them. So 200v went coursing through six machines and fried them. It seems that the US Army had the circuit breakers removed so that they could provide their own power service. Lesson 0: With enough electrical current, everything is a fuse.Fortunately, we had exactly six judges machines. So we gave the six teams the machines (after the power was fixed by disconnecting the wires). And all was well except we could not judge any submissions. In the meantime, I had remembered that there were half a dozen IBM demo machines downstairs in the CSC Exhibit Area. Of course this was at night (6PM to midnight or later back then) and there was a guard, a very kind guard. I true gentleman of the South. Now after discussing matters with him and our concurring that a failed Finals was simply not acceptable in New Orleans, he let the judges come in and use the machines to judge the contest.You know, at the heart of it all, there is such a thing as love of community with all of its faults and failures. So, kudos to our knight in blue. The contest successfully concluded.There was the time that a colleague graciously accepted “NEXT” t-shirts for the contestants even though Apple was the sponsor. I think it was 1987 St. Louis. This was during the time of estrangement between Steve Jobs and Apple. So Apple spends maybe $100K for the contestants to all wear “NEXT” t-shirts? Sure. So I lost them. Of course after the Finals was over, we gave them to the contestants. We keep our commitments but sometimes… BTW, Burt Cummins of Apple sent me a “NEXT” t-shirt, but it was spelled “NEVR”, anyway, I think it was Burt.There was the time that Apple had provided equipment and a colleague was certain that we could handle submission over AppleTalk with a miserable mail system. That was 1888 in Atlanta, Georgia. We had sneaker net as a second contest system (we always have two ways to conduct the World Finals). To avoid embarrassment during testing, I collected the network hardware without approval. It was a bit tense, but the contest worked without a hitch.And then there was AT&T, a great sponsor! It was 1990 and we had the first Finals in which submissions were by Ethernet. Fortunately, we also had Mark Measures. We had the finest workstations running System V UNIX. The 1990 Finals were in Washington, D. C. Now this one was amazing. I had called in favors. Big time. All of us were invited to the White House the day after the contest to tour and then see President George Herbert Walker Bush and wife Barbara in the Rose Garden.We had a great contest! The three major networks agreed to cover part the Finals. They sent TV cameras and news crews. It was spectacular until…They all left just before the contest started. All of them. Not one of them stayed. You see, across the street from the hotel, there was a night club. There was a night club in which a fight broke out. And a knife came out. Triple Murder! Live on all of the news channels.So for the “I was born after the Internet” crowd, its a good thing that there are now a lot of channels and a lot of great reporters that cover the ACM-ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM. Because IBM is a great company at getting the word out about you. A billion press impressions per year is amazing.So back to the contest, the contest succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It ended with accurate results. The next day we all went to the White House and saw the President of the USA. By the way, did you know that President Clinton is a fan? There are many heads of state that think that the world would be a better place if we solved problems more frequently than we created them.OK. That got me to 1990. I’ve written replies now for 6 hours. So I’ll just highlight a few more.The introduction of balloons to bring back the visuals of sneaker net once we handled transactions (still by the Cookbook) over ethernet. Why there are different colored balloons. Why we reduced teams from 4 to 3.1991 San Antonio, what a great contest! CJ Hwang committed to grow the contest in Asia. What a miracle worker.1992 Kansas City, the University of Melbourne wins. Balloons start. Threatened with a $150 per balloon fee for getting them down, I bought a pump b-b gun with a scope, set up a range for Mark Measures, determined the necessary strength to pop the balloon but not embed in the ceiling, demoed one shot, handed Mark the gun and left. There were no fees and no lights knocked out. We were on a budget. At the awards ceremony I was given an incorrect order of finish. I announced that the Harvard team had won $1,000. I financed it. There is such a thing as honor. When they came up, I asked them given the circumstances, wouldn’t they come back the next year and win the championship?1993: Indianapolis, again. In 1982, it was -23 degrees F. Back to 1993. Harvard team wins the World Finals! Congratulations again, Derrick, Tony, and Craig! Now I didn’t go to Harvard. However, my 7th great grandfather Joshua Moodey graduate in 1658. He was a minister of 1st Church Boston. He was offered the job of President of Harvard but turned it down because the students were too rowdy. Must have gotten considerably better since then. OK, OK, ministers keep family records, and back then, four hour sermons. So it’s genetic and the reason that I rarely write.And then there were the Microsoft sponsorship years! What a great company. And Tonya Dressel, convincing “Good Morning America” to give us coverage. However, labeling me the “High Geek of Computing” in the Wall Street Journal was over the top. I still laugh about that. I could only image what my friends thought about that, especially given the work I was doing at the time. Anyway. Shout out.So we are in Nashville, 1995, at the Grand Old Opry Hotel. We are there during the country music awards and all of the stars are chatting us up. We are celebrities! So James Comer is talking to Dolly Parton and I look at the two of him. He is there with his “Director” ribbon, “Judge” ribbon, and ACM badge. ACM. “Academy of Country Music”. Oh well, the celebrity was short lived when they read the fine print, Association for Computing Machinery.OK, let’s wrap this up. There was Philadelphia and then San Jose. During the Awards Ceremony we had a bomb scare. There was the Unibomber. Letter from the FBI. Tonya Dressel, this was your fault!And then we came to 1998, the first year of IBM sponsorship in Atlanta. The ACM ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM. Thanks Brenda Chow, John Swainson, and Steve Mills. We will complete 20 years of sponsorship in 2017. And we have a lot to do to make sure that the ICPC is here for another generation of problem solvers.So, it’s the night before the contest and all is well except my daughters are restless and asked to go take a tour of the hotel and contest area in the middle of the night. “Dad! There was a fork lift trying to get in the contest area! There were posters on all the walls. They aren’t IBM posters, they are Microsoft posters!” So I went down with them and there must have been 100–200 posters everywhere and a fork lift wanting to go through the contest area to put up some more signs. I fixed that.So we spent the next hour or so taking down signs, hundreds of signs. Signs on the walls, in the stair wells, on the doors, even in the rest rooms! It was hilarious! However, it was not the way to start the IBM sponsorship. I kept a couple of them. I gave John Swainson one of them as a souvenir. Do folks love the ICPC. You bet.There was one that I didn’t get. There was a Microsoft banner on the inside door of one of the stalls in the Lady’s Room. There are limits to what I will do as director.So maybe next year, I’ll tell you some really amazing things about contest problems, judging, printing, security, a seriel powerplug puller, and what happened during the 20 years of IBM sponsorship. But I’m pooped.Best,Bill