There are two eras to my involvement with computers. Back in the early 80s I was in a vocational program offered by Edmonds Community College. The program was "Engineer Drawing". The instructor, Max L. Lewis was a different sort of duck. He set the course work up so that it was completely self-paced. On paper it was a two year program. I had a ticket to ride the full distance.
As I was saying, Max was a different kind of duck. Because the course work was self-paced and he encouraged older students to help the new ones, he never did any teaching in the traditional sense. He was free to just float around and bullshit. Which was his favorite thing to do. As he would proudly tell anyone he had a masters degree in scatology. "logy" is the study of; "scat" is shit or feces. Now this is no bullshit. More accurately it is dinosaur shit. He did his research by preparing slides of fossilized dinosaur turds and collecting data on the pollen found therein. In this way he was able to determine what the dinosaur had eaten.
The learning environment he thus engendered was so cool. So different from public high school (which I hated). I really excelled in this setting. I went through all the basic course work in about six months. During these bullshit sessions he would keep bring up different ideas. When I had finished up the basic stuff he would spark my interest in something during one of these sessions then the next day there would be a pile of books for further study on my desk. Sometimes it would be a single book. For example one time it was an extremely well written book for self-taught trigonometry. I then learned the basics of trig in three days. Another time it was a pamphlet of maybe twenty pages or so, third year analytical geometry. I soon had folded polyhedrons sitting all over my desk.
Another student and I teamed up to design a collapsible engine hoist. Max loaned my his Texas Instruments TI-59. With some advise from the engineers on the Industry Advisory Board (engineers from PAC-CAR and Kenworth)(One of the engineers from PAC-CAR was the project engineer for the Abrams M-1 Battle Tank, the U.S. Army's main tank today.) to ensure that I was using the right treatment, I programmed the calculator to do the stress analysis work. What was really cool about this project was that some students in the machine shop program built one for the auto shop program.
After that Max brought in his own TRS-80 Pocket Computer. A pathetic joke by today's standards but it had an abridged form of BASIC. I was bitten by the bug, the programming bug that is (pun intended). It took only a week for the fun to wear off that toy. Just not enough memory, only a k or two. It was bubble memory so it would not go away when turned off but there was no interface for external storage. I actually continued to use the TI-59 after returning this toy to Max as I was able to store my programs on magnetic strips. It was then at this point that books concerning Boolean logic and artificial intelligence began appearing on my desk.
I am not sure how much time passed but eventually Max was able to get the school to fund the purchase of a TRS-80 Color Computer. Two 5.25 floppy (external) drives and a whopping 32k of system memory (including ROM where the bios, BASIC interpreter, and DOS resided). I was given the unopened boxes the computer came in, an old color TV from the Electronics Program (an old school TV repair program), and a large closet with a desk and chair. I soon had color blobs flying around the screen in response to the arrow keys. Not long after that I had written a chess program and a word processor. The chess program sucked. It had the board, the pieces and their proper movement but no intelligence to actually play. I had run out of room, er . . . RAM. The idea of a swap file on disk did not occur to me. (I don't need to feel stupid about that as I don't know that it had occurred to anyone else at that time either, at least not in the personal computer realm. Um . . . that is an interesting question. This was late summer of 1982. I was reading Byte, Dr. Dobbs, the IEEE periodical, and am not sure what else. Well, I am wandering here.)
I spent the winter in that closet. Took an Othello game from Byte and re-wrote it so that it actually worked. Played with some AI automaton. While I was doing that the Electronics instructor retired and the school hired Walt Anderson, a top notch electronics technician. He spent the winter revamping the electronics program. In the spring he was still not able to get the school to fund the training he needed to remain current so he left to go back to industry. Before he left he gave a one week crash course in assembly language programming for the Motorola 6800 family of CPUs. The class was open to his electronics students and me. It was cool. I even found a bug in one of the exercises that no one had found before. (He had taught this same class to electronic engineering students for several years.)
Shortly after that my ticket to ride expired. I moved to downtown Seattle and began making my own way through the dog eat dog world. I kept reading Byte for a while. I started to work for a guy who was trying to start a computer i/o interface company. He had no money to pay me so that lasted all of a week or so. I could not afford any hardware so computers faded as a real world possibility for me.
Eighteen Years Later
I arrived in Missoula December of 1997. I went over to the library and the week before x-mas attempted to get onto the Internet for the first time. In January I saw a flyer announcing the start of a computer technician program being offered by the YWCA. I was accepted for enrollment and by the time classes started in the middle of March I had my second email account at Hotmail as ken_i_m. (I still have that account. It is the one I use to register "whatever" so it is where all the spam gets sent to.) The program was six hours a day, five days a week. (I was working evenings and weekends at Goldsmith as a cook.) Towards the end of April I started building my website at Geocities. (Note: Around the first part of November 1999, I went to my website for the first time in a long time and noticed that all the files were over a year old. So, I began overhauling it.) The program wrapped up the middle of May but they were able to keep the lab open until funding ran out the end of June.
The first of May I bought what was left of a Packard-Bell that had been cannibalized to build a new system (I got a case, keyboard, mainboard, and 486SX-25 CPU). I paid $30 for that. I then got some RAM and various drives. I was able to buy my monitor the first of June. (Goldsmith's only pays once a month.) At that point I was up and running with Windows 3.11 and lots of free, demo, and shareware downloaded from the Internet. Bought a 4 GB hard drive in August. Upgraded to Windows 95 in September. In February (with the help of Mark over a Cyber Shock (I bought the parts through them so assembly was free and relieved me of the worry of getting it to boot)) I built my Celeron 400 box. Upgraded to Windows 98 at the same time.
I have not done any programming yet in this the second era. As close as I have come is using a text editor and writing everything in HTML. I have Visual C++ and Visual Basic. I have a number of books for those and other languages. I just have not come up with a reason to use them. I have started to read about CGI and will need to learn Perl, Basic or whatever to implement that.
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