Early years 1978-1984
As a kid, I loved puzzle books, Lego-building and challenges that required deep thinking. I always felt a bit different in this regard, as I never fit in with the other girls on my elementary school playground playing with dolls and other stereotypical girl toys.
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| Teletype Device |
I became so attached to this class that I would come into the classroom early before school started and experiment. I remember typing a command that listed games available in some sort of public library, and was intrigued. I believe this was a precursor to what would later become the World Wide Web. One of my favorite games during this era was what I knew simply as “Adventure” and I can still remember the countless hours spent trying to navigate out of the “twisty maze” by drawing a map on paper. For more history on the Adventure game, click here .
As the marking period ended, my teacher pulled me aside and told me I had a gift for programming, and if I was ever trying to figure out what to do for a career, I should consider something in this field. Then he sent home a note to my parents about how I excelled in his class. Given that feedback from other teachers was consistently along the lines of “talks too much”, “cannot sit still”, receiving this feedback was just what I needed to boost my self-esteem (Thank you Mr. Fred Zimmerman!)
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| Radio Shack's TRS-80 |
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| My beloved Timex Sinclair computer - still lives in my closet! |
When high school rolled around, I was able to choose between two programming classes: Cobol or Fortran, and I chose Fortran. Again, I was either the only or one of very few girls in the class and again, my love of programming was reinforced.
Please continue reading the next chapter in my blog: College and Early Career 1984-1993
This was so fun reading, because I got into computers around the same time, and had similar experiences. I started in the 6th or 7th grade, using a teletype similar to the one you show. At the end of the school year, they told us our accounts would be wiped over the summer, and so I turned on the tape puncher and listed all of my BASIC programs. It was the first time I ever saved code to a computer-readable storage medium. (I often listed my BASIC apps on paper for troubleshooting, or to share with other students, but I didn't think of it as "saving" because there was no way to get that back into the computer.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of the following school year, I logged into my new (empty) account, and proceeded to load all my old programs from the paper tape. I thought it was amazing!
Like you, I also would write simple 2 or 3 line BASIC apps on computers in stores. I remember that MS BASIC that was included with new PCs (circa 1981) had a command to play a sound with a given frequency, something like "SOUND 100" to play a sound at 100Hz.). My code looked like this:
10 a=1
20 play a
30 a=a+1
40 goto 20
I hit play and it immediately started playing a tone that started low, then got higher and higher in pitch, getting more annoying as it continued. I tried to casually walk away, but got caught. The people working there apparently didn't know about CTRL-C, and they wouldn't let me touch it again. They just unplugged the computer to make it stop.
I wasn't welcome in the store again. I later tried the same trick at a different store, but put in a delay so the sound didn't start playing until I was at another part of the store looking at something else.
Very interesting cuz. My first job in 1974 after graduating college was a teletype operator for a Commodities Exchange Firm in St. Louis. The brokers needed their orders executed rapidly and perfectly to The Chicago Mercantile. If it was done correctly I received like a penny bonus commission. Needless to say I became a great typist and the pennies added up!. It was so much fun having an element of gambling on the job!. Unfortunately now I'm a complete technodummy lol. I just do email and play Words With Friends.
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