I go back to 1973. I was hired to teach math and English and be the business manager at a private school in Poughkeepsie, NY. When I got there a few days before school started, I was told I was also going to teach computer programming. There was an IBM fellow who was researching the use of computer terminals in schools, and he had selected us to be one of his target schools since we were only a local phone call away from the IBM facility. So we had set up a small room in the top of our ancient admin building with a phone, a teletype type compter terminal (used 11x17 continious form feed green bar paper, if any of you remember THAT stuff!), an analog 300 baud modem which hooked us up to the mainframe, can't recall now whether a 360 or 370, and enough room for me and about four students, which was my first class. So they and I together learned APL from a book. It was a blast.
Did that for five years, then next school I went to five years later we had about six TRS-80s with casssette tape storage.
Next involvement was in 1980 when I got involved in a start-up company which built multi-tasking computers using the Z-80 chip and hand-wired boards. They were mounted in full-size desks we built in our tiny little office. I was the financial manager, the sales manager, the support rep, and lots of other things, except that I never got involved at all in the design, wire-wrapping, etc. I was management. <g> I moved on after a few years but hung on to my stock options. The company survived and morphed and eventually got bought out by Adaptec. End of my computer career, except as an enduser. But it was a fun ride.
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The cheaper the paper, the more important the information. Peter Lynch.
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Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing. G.K. Chesterton
