Windows TP .... nyuk, nyuk

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>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Masoner <richardm@cd.com> writes:

    Richard> A short history of my computer experience.  Bro Brown's
    Richard> is *much* more extensive.  Some of my chronology might be
    Richard> a bit off.

Well, if this is ancient history day, I guess I could tell my story of
how I got into computing also.

As as kid, I was a tinkerer.  My first engineering talent was
displayed when I was less than 2 years old.  My mother loves to tell
this story.  I received a little toy train made of wooden cars and an
engine and caboose.  The cars were attached together by screw hooks
and screw eyes, obviously before child safety was a big issue with toy
manufacturers.  When told to go in my room for a nap, I played with
this little train for a while, but soon grew bored with playing and
decided to take it apart.  I had all the screw hooks and eyes out of
it, but one hook was missing.  

You guessed it: I had swallowed it!  This resulted in a frantic rush
to the doctor, who sent me to the hospital for xrays.  One of my
earliest memories is being x-rayed for that stupid screw hook.  The
doctor found it, and said that my mother should keep an eye out in my
poo for the missing hook, and if it did not come out in a couple of
days, to call him.  Well, it all came out alright. :-)

By the age of 6, when I could read well enough to turn a plastic model
airplane into the USS glue tube, my father came home from a business
trip with a crystal radio kit, made by Remco (who remembers them?).  I
put it together and was delighted to hear the local radio station,
WNDR Syracuse New York, clearly thru the headphones.  Well, soon the
quest for more stations caused the front yard to look like an antenna
farm as I pulled wires between all the trees and the house.  For
Christmas that year, I received a 2 tube radio kit, again from Remco.
This took a couple of days to assemble, but it worked great, and I was
hooked.

My father then opened his treasured junk box and I started building
electronic projects with scrap parts instead of store bought kits.  My
allowance was usually spent at Empire Electronics, the local
electronics parts distributor.  Since my father worked for GE at the
time, I received research lab transistors to play with as well as all
those old tubes.  This was over the 1956-1960 time frame.

Seventh & Eighth grade science fiar projects were electronic, of
course.  By then, however, I was also into model airplanes more, and
had forsaken the plastic variety for the balso wood kind, usually of
my own design, later adding glo-plug engines and flying them on
cables via "U-control".  

In 9th grade, I really wanted to build a radio controlled model
airplane, but the cost was prohibitive to a student.  A magazine I
read, Radio Control Modeller, ran a multi-part series on how to build
your own radio control, and it was not analog, but *DIGITAL*!  Wow!
Maybe I could afford RC if I built my own elecronics, I thought.

I read and re-read the articles until I could draw the schematics in
my sleep for the digital servo control system.  My schoolwork
suffered, but I did not care; this was *TOO* interesting.

Well, I still couldn't afford RC, even if I built it myself, but I got
very interested in this new digital stuff as a result of my studying.
This was 1965.

That same year, Fairchild Camera & Instrument Co. announced the first
commerciallialy available digital integrated circuits, or ICs -- chips
we call them nowdays.  I remember the Fairchild uL904.  It had 4
transistors inside of it, all on a single peoce of silicon, and it
could operate at speeds up to 1/10 MHz.  The uL932 had 15
transistors.  It was mind boggling!

I wrote Fairchild and got a complete set of data sheets for these new
marvels.  I could not wait to get my hands on some of them for some
exciting new project.  Nowdays, its pretty hard for a kid, a sophmore
in high school, to get data sheets for a newly released chip, but back
then, anyone could have them -- just ask.

A friend of mine who had lots of money bought some parts and we built
a few things with these chips.  By this time, Popular Electronics
magazine had also started to feature projects with this chips.

The next year, I walked down the hall in the basement of Ginnalat Hall
at Culver Military where I went to school, and I saw a big box the
size of a double-wide deli beer refrigerator with the letters IBM on
it.  I asked someone what was in it.  They said it was the school's
new computer!  

I asked who was in charge of it, and they gave me the name of the
teacher who would be teaching programming on it.  When I talked to
him, he said the programming class was only for seniors, but that I
was welcome to come by after classes in the afternoon and learn how to
use it anyway.

I asked him how I could start learning about it.  He gave me a set of
IBM reference manuals.  I had them read before IBM had set the
computer up and finished testing it.  It was an IBM 1401 with 8 KB of
core memory and a 10.2 usec cycle time, or about 1/10 MHz and 1/80 MB.
It was a 7 bit design, plus parity, for 8 bits per access, overall.
By comparison, my P200 with 128 MB is about 160,000 times as powerful,
an can be lifted with one hand!

I literally lived in the computer room every afternoon for that year. 

When I went off to college, I discovered a *HUGE* (by those days
standards) computer.  It was an IBM 360/75 with 512 KB memory (1/2
MB).  It handled all the computing for Duke University, UNC, and NC
State.  This was 1969.  Again, I lived in the computer room, and truly
I learned my profession that year, but I cut too many classes and they
asked me to not come back.  :-(

I decided there was nothing that college could teach me about
programming that I did not already know, so I tried to get a job in
computers the simmer of 1970.  I finally got a job with the New
Jersey Bell Telephone Company in Newark New Jersey (Yuck!).  I had 6
months to complete a training course for COBOL programming.  I
finished it in a week, but only after I wrote myself a set of
assembler (BAL) subroutines to do the things COBOL couldn't do easily
that I had grown accustomed to in PL/1.  My boss was a bit intimidated
by me, I think.

I came back home and entered a college that did not have a computer to
distract me.  I majored in math, and graduated in 3 years instead of 4
even though the only credits I could transfer from Duke were for
freshman composition.  I taught a programming course while I was there
for the continuing education department, using computers at Grumman
Aerospace Corp., but I never took any more computer courses as an
undergrad. 

While going to this smaller school, I also held a part time job as an
electronics technician.  I worked as a tech for several companies.
When I could not find a summer job one year, 1973 -- when *MANY*
engineers were out of work -- I took a full time job as an associate
engineer and finished up school at night.

The rest of the story is chronicled in my resume:

   http://www.elilabs.com/~rj/resume

if you are interested.  If you are *REALLY* interested, and would like
to use my consulting services, email me and lets talk!

-- 
--------  "And there came a writing to him from Elijah"  [2Ch 21:12]  --------
Robert Jay Brown III rj@eli.elilabs.com  http://www.elilabs.com 1 847 705-0424
Elijah Laboratories Inc.;  37 South Greenwood Avenue;  Palatine, IL 60067-6328
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