This is another blog of mine caused by another members comments. For the other, see “My encounter with Neil Armstrong”
Just to start I am 65 years old with a degree in Chemical Engineering. Spent about 2 years doing that with a Oil company. Spent the next 23 years programming on a main frame (enterprise server now) for 3 years at the oil company and twenty years at a greeting card company. During that time I: Taught my self COBOL and had a production program within 2 weeks. Punched computer cards and used a card reader. Loaded a tape drive and threaded the tape in it. Saw the installation of a dot matrix printer. Learned and programmed a Lotus 123 (precursor to Excel) that when finished displayed “Program over” but displays “Th th that’s all folks” randomly 1 time out of ten. The VP I wrote it for loved it. Was senior programmer in COBOL with the most complicated program mine. IDMS database programmer and administrator, CICS (online) systems programmer, Systems Programmer (installed operating system), DASD (disk storage) admin, Changeman admin (change control system) and Quickjob expert(simple programming language). Had to learn Assembler for Y2K (yes, did Y2K changes). Once had a phone call from a user while I was at home. Had desktop without a battery. Called to say the screen was blank. I asked if things were plugged in and turned on (yes, you have to ask). Asked for model. Them “I cant it’s too dark.” Me ” Turn on a light.” Them “Cant . The power is out.” I almost told them to turn in their computer as they were too stupid to use one. I just merely explained. That is my work cred.
Back during the time at the oil company I got a TRS 80 model 3 with 8k memory and a tape drive for storage. Upgraded to 16 k and a 10 meg hard drive. The store knew me as I was the first to do this in town. Programmed it to help with a strategic version of a board game call Star Fleet Battles. Still have the game, computer died a long time ago. Over the years for my home use over many computers, (including a Commodore 128) I put in more memory, added hard drives when you had to move jumpers, put in mother boards, changed power supplies, changed video cards and put a dual boot system. This allowed me to boot up in either of two Windows versions to play games that could work on one Windows version but not the other. Am I a computer nerd or what?
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D.
2 replies on “Musings of an older computer nerd.”
Yes! You are a computer nerd! So was I, but on much more a software rather than hardware level. My language – I used to joke I was no good at spoken languages (Spanish), but really good at the unspoken ones (Latin) – was Fortran. Learned a little Assembly, C, C++. I bowed out when we started turning towards ‘object oriented’ development, it was a paradigm shift too far for my more logical functional brain.
BTW, I was trained (e.g. college) B.S. Mathematician, but all roads seemed to look to software engineering in those days. In college, we did the punch cards, including writing them out by hand on very wide special paper before typing into card (typing mistakes, wowza, start over on a new card!)
Approx same age as you, have finally retired, don’t miss it, just miss the people and the camaraderie…
Actually I also was more into programming as well. Just that for my personal computer I had no choice to do my upgrades so I could play my games and do the programming on it I wanted. Don’t have the time now still working with 4 rescue dogs and a wife with health issues. Miss it though. Will retire soon, then back into nerddom😀 And yes I used that very special paper before typing into the card.