And So It Began
Thirty years ago today, a career was born. I bought my first computer.
I’d always been fascinated by computers, ever since using a time shared teletype attached to a distant PDP-7 via an acoustic modem at the Museum of Science. It played a game called Lunar Lander. You had to work out how to budget your fuel to achieve a soft landing on the moon, or the clattering printhead would create a permanent paper record of how deep a crater you’d made. When I was in high school, I used a similar interface to communicate with Tufts University’s PDP-11. In 1984, my office got an IBM PC-XT for running payroll. Unbeknownst to them, I started spending nights working on it, poring through the slipcased IBM documentation for DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 1.1, and WordStar. But it wasn’t until a dozen years after high school that I was able to afford a machine of my own - a floor model Compaq Portable from Sears Business Systems. I wasn’t really able to afford it, but American Express had inadvisedly sent me a credit card a couple weeks earlier…
I remember schlepping that 30 pound sewing-machine case on public transport back to my house. When I got home, I fired up MS-DOS 1.1, played around with MS-BASIC, then proceeded to take the machine apart to admire its innards. It was a remarkable piece of engineering - a sturdy polycarbonate plastic shell protected an anodized aluminum inner skeleton. Its dual double-sided double-density floppy disk drives had rugged rubber shock absorbers where they attached to the frame, as did the nine-inch monochrome long-persistence phosphor screen.
I was fanatically devoted to that machine. I pirated every single piece of software I could get my hands on (and Xeroxed reams of documentation) just to learn it. Based on the skills I taught myself, I was able to get a job as a temp, which led to a permanent job as a financial analyst for a state agency. My qualifications? I knew Lotus 1-2-3!
Fortunately, I did manage to pay that American Express bill, but it was tight. My next purchase was more memory - from 256 K to 512 K, as much as that machine could handle. Then I bought a $100 memory decoder PROM chip that let me access 640 K. Then I replaced a floppy drive with a 20 MB Seagate hard drive - it cost about $400. I was also buying software now: Borland Sidekick, the next version of Lotus 1-2-3, a neat add-on from Lotus called HAL, WordPerfect 4.2, Paradox database… Back then, any business software program had a set price: $495. A big program like Lotus Symphony was $695. But it was worth it to learn them. I also subscribed to industry trade journals like Computerworld and Infoworld - they were fat weekly papers back then - as well as the monthlies like PC Magazine. I read obsessively.
Then my state agency bought a local area network server from Banyan and let me play with it.
It was a great career that I completely lucked into. I never had a college education, never took a computer science course, never really learned to program (though I picked up a few things along the way). Oddly, I never got into computer gaming. Figuring out how computers and networks worked was enough of a game for me. I was sure that one day my employer would find out that I was a fraud and that would be it - especially when deep in the throes of some knotty problem or other. But eventually I'd figure it out, and move along to the next level.
And so it went, up until my retirement last year. I got away with it.
I’d always been fascinated by computers, ever since using a time shared teletype attached to a distant PDP-7 via an acoustic modem at the Museum of Science. It played a game called Lunar Lander. You had to work out how to budget your fuel to achieve a soft landing on the moon, or the clattering printhead would create a permanent paper record of how deep a crater you’d made. When I was in high school, I used a similar interface to communicate with Tufts University’s PDP-11. In 1984, my office got an IBM PC-XT for running payroll. Unbeknownst to them, I started spending nights working on it, poring through the slipcased IBM documentation for DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 1.1, and WordStar. But it wasn’t until a dozen years after high school that I was able to afford a machine of my own - a floor model Compaq Portable from Sears Business Systems. I wasn’t really able to afford it, but American Express had inadvisedly sent me a credit card a couple weeks earlier…
I remember schlepping that 30 pound sewing-machine case on public transport back to my house. When I got home, I fired up MS-DOS 1.1, played around with MS-BASIC, then proceeded to take the machine apart to admire its innards. It was a remarkable piece of engineering - a sturdy polycarbonate plastic shell protected an anodized aluminum inner skeleton. Its dual double-sided double-density floppy disk drives had rugged rubber shock absorbers where they attached to the frame, as did the nine-inch monochrome long-persistence phosphor screen.
I was fanatically devoted to that machine. I pirated every single piece of software I could get my hands on (and Xeroxed reams of documentation) just to learn it. Based on the skills I taught myself, I was able to get a job as a temp, which led to a permanent job as a financial analyst for a state agency. My qualifications? I knew Lotus 1-2-3!
Fortunately, I did manage to pay that American Express bill, but it was tight. My next purchase was more memory - from 256 K to 512 K, as much as that machine could handle. Then I bought a $100 memory decoder PROM chip that let me access 640 K. Then I replaced a floppy drive with a 20 MB Seagate hard drive - it cost about $400. I was also buying software now: Borland Sidekick, the next version of Lotus 1-2-3, a neat add-on from Lotus called HAL, WordPerfect 4.2, Paradox database… Back then, any business software program had a set price: $495. A big program like Lotus Symphony was $695. But it was worth it to learn them. I also subscribed to industry trade journals like Computerworld and Infoworld - they were fat weekly papers back then - as well as the monthlies like PC Magazine. I read obsessively.
Then my state agency bought a local area network server from Banyan and let me play with it.
It was a great career that I completely lucked into. I never had a college education, never took a computer science course, never really learned to program (though I picked up a few things along the way). Oddly, I never got into computer gaming. Figuring out how computers and networks worked was enough of a game for me. I was sure that one day my employer would find out that I was a fraud and that would be it - especially when deep in the throes of some knotty problem or other. But eventually I'd figure it out, and move along to the next level.
And so it went, up until my retirement last year. I got away with it.