My junior year of high school, my school obtained an IBM 1401 computer. I was all over that thing as soon as I saw the shipping crates. I had obtained a copy of the reference manual (the so called "Principals of Operation", or "PO") before it was out of the crate. I asked if classes would be taught on it, and was told one class would be open to seniors only. The instructor was a nice guy though, and offerred to let me sit in on the open labs in the afternoon, even though I was only a junior. When I became a senior, I took the class, which was a peice of cake by that time, as I had a year of programming under my belt then. I knew I wanted to work with computers. I decided to go to Duke and major in electrical engineering.
I spent my freshman year at Duke in 1969 and got kicked out because the second semister I lived in the computer center and never went to class. When finals rolled around, I could not even remember what classes I was enrolled in, so they kicked me out! I then tried to get work as a programmer, since I had already taken all the software courses that Duke offered, and was pretty good at programming. It was hard to get a job the summer of 1970. Engineers were driving taxicabs in NYC back then. I finally got a trainee position with the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. They gave me 6 months to learn COBOL and write a training program. I took the RCA Spectra-70 COBOL Languagre Reference Manual home with me and learned COBOL in less than a week. I thought it was a pretty brain-dead language even then, as I had worked in FORTRAN and PL/1, with some 360-BAL. I particularly loathed the lack of good string manipulation routines in COBOL, so I wrote my own strings package in assembler. I then used this package to write my training program. My boss was a useless RPG programmer. He totally did not understand what I had written. He could see that it worked, but the idea of a trainee writing his own hot-rod strings package in assembler was a major shock to him. So I went back to school -- this time in a liberal arts college that did not even have a computer. In fact, the only involvement I had with computers the next 3 years was to teach a mini-course on programming that a local aerospace firm provided the computer time for. I majored in math. If the school had offered minors, I would have had minors in physics and biology. If I had stayed another semister, I could have had a triple major. I went out into the workplace by default one spring when I could not land a summer job, but I was able to land a full time job. I finished up school at night and with an independent study. Ten years later, now married and with a daughter, mortgage, and all that, my wife talked me into going back to grad school. I went at night, and I majored again in math, because the computer science couses were taught in in the school of business, and the computer engineering courses were taught in around embedded systems, which I had done so much of by that time I would have been way ahead of the teachers. The math department, however, was the seat of the artificial intelligence research, and that was where my real interest was. I did all the credits, but not the thesis, since I had to move before I finished. I turned my first thesis topic into a paper and published it in Doctor Dobbs Journal in April of 1986. I published another paper with them in April 1988, and 2 more later on, although the latter two were not AI related. By this time, I had my own consulting business, working full time as an independent consultant, mostly on embedded systems stuff. This continued up until the big "dot-com crach" in 2000. I have not had a proper consulting assignment since March of 2001, although I did do one little thing involving the addition of some customization to VNC. I am seriously contemplating a minor career change from software development to systems administration, as too many of the development jobs are going to non-English speaking countries for below minimum wage rates. In order to really administer a system, you sometimes need to be staring it in the face, where you can push buttons, flip switches, and attack it with a screwdriver and soldering iron. It will be harder to ship those jobs off to a remote location. Education is nice, but the economy is the governing factor. I still have that wife and daughter I told you about! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
