On LinkedIn, someone started a thread boasting about the length and width of their computing pedigree. Here is mine:

1967: In the summer of my freshman year in high school, I learned my first computer language: QUIKOMP. It was the assembly language for the Monrobot Mark 11, which used a rotating drum instead of RAM to store instructions. The most important I/O was punched paper tape, coming in from and going out to a teletype terminal. I debugged my code by stepping through it one instruction at a time, reading the lights on the front panel. I learned Hex. I could read paper tape, and easily spot the holes for return/line feed (0D, 0A). I spent all summer writing a program that ran too slowly; the high school student who was supervising me wrote the entire program in COBOL in one morning, and it ran faster than my program. Assembly language is, apparently, not always optimized, although it was definitely not the fastest way to code.

1968: I was 16, Bill Gates was 13. He was timesharing a GE computer from his boys’ school in Seattle, using a teletype terminal. At my technical high school, ¹ I was feeding punched paper tape into the same computer. Both of us were programming in Dartmouth BASIC in its fourth year.

1969: A friend of mine had a job as a computer operator. When he wasn’t entering boot routines using toggle switches, he demonstrated that a computer could make music if you put am AM radio on top of it. The tones depended on the operations being performed. Once you knew the relationship, you could get the computer to play simple songs, rather than doing its actual work.

1970: I learned Cobol by submitting 80-column cards into an IBM 1130. I now spoke a third language. I learned to distrust language specs, and started every program I ever wrote after that with a section that cleared all the variables. The manual said the interpreter or compiler would take care of that. Bitter experience showed me that wasn’t true. Try starting every run after the first with all your variables–unknown to you–filled with garbage. Add garbage to a real number and you get garbage.

I was told about AI and Arpanet (later to be known as the Internet). Not that I understood it. AI By The Rules.

1982: I owned an Exidy Sorcerer. It didn’t have a word processor, so I wrote one from scratch in Z80 assembler (my fourth language). The program was stored on cassette tape.

1983: On Wheel Of Fortune I won an Atari personal computer. As I told Pat, it was my third computer. My daughter, then just three years old, would later use it to log onto CompuServe forums.
** Also in 1983, a friend of mine sent me the Macintosh Lisa. I never reviewed it, didn’t care much for it.

1984: The Mac was introduced in January, 1984.

1985: I actually ran Windows 1.0 because Superbase, a critical app of mine, required it. At the time, I thought real men didn’t use mice. ² I was 90% DOS until Windows 3.0, when my employer forced me to switch.

On March 12, 1985, on the Computer Chronicles, I offered a commentary about the Mac: Paul Schindler Pans The Macintosh

1990s: Recording macros for Microsoft Word is for wimps. I wrote mine in VBA, ³ my fifth language.⁴ If that doesn’t prove I’ve been around a while, that I have chops, I don’t know what will.

Footnotes

1. 1. Benson Polytechnic School (The Nation’s Finest), 140 miles south in Portland. When I got to MIT, I discovered that students who attended the Bronx School of Science did not accept Benson’s claim. ↩︎
2. 2. OK, I was wrong ↩︎
3. 3. Visual Basic for Applications ↩︎
4. 4. What was I, Swiss? A country awash with trilingual people. Well, yes, my grandfather was an immigrant from German Switzerland. All professionals in Switzerland speak the main languages, French, German and Italian. If you speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you speak two you’re bilingual. If you speak one language… you’re American. ↩︎