I was impressed because the screen displayed all of the fields to be
entered and then you could move from field to field without the
screen scrolling as it was completely redrawn. "So that's what they meant
by cursor control!" I marvelled.
"I'm afraid of computers. In stories they are always turning evil and taking over the planet." The ninth-grade me protested when Ralph, the math teacher, suggested I take his computer programming class.
"That's silly, computers aren't like that at all." Ralph answered. "Just take the class, you'll see."
So since Ralph was pretty cool as adults went, I thought I'd try it. Besides I knew the trick to thwarting evil computer's plots from Star Trek! Just tell them a paradox like This statement is a lie, and they would burn themselves out trying to process it.
My school had no computers of its own. So two afternoons a week, our class of about 5 kids would climb into Ralph's car and ride up to the Lawrence Hall of Science.
The terminals we used were big
teletypes with yellow paper. I don't know what type of computer it was, but
nearly every time we went it seemed like the computer would crash, with a
resounding thud. I loved the command to run programs - XEQ-$.
Execute that program!
Besides talking to Eliza (she responds best when you talk nonsense and swear) and Hunting the Wumpus
, we learned some of the very basics of Basic programming. The longest program we wrote involved drawing an ascii graphic picture using read and data statements. The data statements were the longest part of the program. I drew a hand with upraised middle finger. Luckily, my teacher loved it. (Well it was mid-70's Berkeley public alternative Jr High school, what do you expect?) I still have a little yellow coil of paper tape that I was told contains my program. Of course I also still have the teletype printout of the result as well.My next chance to use computers was at Sonoma State University. If you signed up for a computer related class you could get a 16K account on the PDP-11. RSTS/E was a friendly operating system. It gently inquired,?What? whenever you typed something it didn't recognize.
I took a Pascal class and learned the joys of finding the missing semi-colon. You know, the one that makes your list of compiler errors go from 45 to 3 in one fell swoop. But my real programs I wrote in Basic Plus.
For my senior project I wrote a program to calculate how much energy an active solar heating system would provide, how much backup heat would be needed and how long it would take the system to pay for itself. I also wrote a program to calculate how much shade different sizes and angles of window overhangs would provide at different times of year.
Purely for my own entertainment I also wrote a biorhythm calculator, a
hangman game, and some other sillinesses. The hangman had to be completely redrawn
each time as the old one scrolled off the screen. Of course I played
much Adventure as well.
Kill the dragon with your bare
hands?
>Yes
Getting an account on the Cyber computer was a little harder, but I had one all of my senior year. The Cyber was actually in Northridge, with 300 baud connections to all of the California State College system. The Cyber was much sterner - ILLEGAL COMMAND, it would state. USERS WILL BE SHOT IN 2 SECONDS I kept expecting it to say next.
The attraction of the Cyber was $TALK. An early IRC-like thing. $TALK was a 14-user chat program that linked all the campuses. I acquired much soap opera material from $TALK. Besides the long- distance teenage love triangles, everyone I $TALKed to kept threatening to commit suicide. I finally resorted to offering to help them. I eventually destroyed the miles of wide green-lined paper that came from spending all night $talking on a Decwriter. So I no longer have blackmail material. The good thing about using $TALK is that it greatly improved my typing skills and speed.
The first job I had after graduation was working in the Stanford Public
Safety Department, entering parking permit information into a database.
I was impressed because the screen displayed all of the fields to be
entered and then you could move from field to field without the
screen scrolling as it was completely redrawn. "So that's what they meant
by cursor control!" I marvelled.
I then took a detour on my computer path. I studied biology and chemistry and made pizzas at San Jose State. The most impressive computer I got to use was the new electronic cash register with special keys for each item. My term papers I typed on a manual typewriter from the forties.
I missed computers so I enrolled at De Anza College.
I took Fortran and was relieved that you could write and save the
program as a batch file. I had managed to avoid ever using punch cards!
My instructor for Algorithm Design was a woman who worked for
Apple. She was talking about some exciting new thing called a mouse. I
couldn't figure out quite what this was, but she seemed to think it
would be very important. She brought one in to show the class, but I
missed that class and did not get to see it.
"Look what I got you at the Flea Market!" Dave told me in 1983. "It's a computer."
The computer was an Atari 400, which had supposedly had it's memory increased to 800K. If you put the cartridge in the slot and plugged the Atari into the television you could write small programs in Basic. Of course these programs were destroyed as soon as you turned the Atari off.
This does not encourage one to write any complex programs. We tried getting the Atari tape drive and used it with only limited success.
We got the Centipede cartridge for it and found its true purpose! It made an excellent Centipede playing machine. We vied for higher and higher scores until we burned the poor thing out.
I simultaneously searched for entry level computer and entry level chemistry jobs. I wound up getting a chemistry job where the computer person also wanted me to work for her some of the time.
At that time the entire company computer system consisted of two Apple II's linked together with a dot matrix printer. We used it for a DBASE database of analytical results for certain ongoing projects.
Within a year the company moved up to a Pr1me minicomputer. We moved the database to Prime Information. We moved from only storing historical data for summary reports to using the computer to generate all of our reports and to pass our billing information to the accounting department.
Prime's operating system Primos was written in Fortran. Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor in the BBC SciFi show Doctor Who was featured in one of their ad campaigns.
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