Where It All Began

My father was a computer programmer from the early 1960's until the early 1990's when he retired while in his early fifties. His journey began by learning to wire boards for an accountant after he got out of college in 1962. This skill landed him a job teaching high school data processing (or programming.) Then a year later he landed a job with General Telephone (GTE) as a beginning programmer and did that until retirement. His only programming classes were several weeks of training in the Dallas-Fort Worth area then the rest was on the job training.

Interestingly enough the replacement teacher, when Dad left the high school, ended up still being the programming teacher at the high school by the time that my sister and myself got there in the late 1970's and both of us took that class.

Other than what little (punch cards and COBOL) my Dad tried to show me about programming up until high school, this class was the first time I had a programming class. We learned BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 (aka Trash-80), RPG, COBOL, and FORTRAN from a terminal connected to a state computer. I forget whether I was a sophomore or a junior when I started the class (either in 1979 or 1980.) We started off learning BASIC and then moved onto other languages of our choice from the list above. I only tried RPG and COBOL. Luckily I did not have to learn FORTRAN for a few more years and luckily stopped using it in around 1997. Interestingly, COBOL was a much more a Literate-like language which Knuth has promoted.

Our instructor made us use this form (on the left) to write out our algorithm. At the time on the TRS-80 you could type in your code and get it running. Then you either printed it out on a narrow ribbon paper or if you had a cassette tape you could save it to cassette. Then you had to type NEW to delete it from the TRS-80 and you were ready to type in another program. I would print the working code out on the ribbon paper and tape or glue it to the work sheet as seen to the left. This is the first BASIC code I wrote.



Here is a example of the ribbon print out. This was just about the longest program we wrote during the class. Most of the program exercises were simple and small. All very sequential in nature.









Looking through my notebook from this class I found an interesting exercise. It appears that the instructor wanted us to write a program to plot a sine curve and to calculate the area under the curve. What I find so interesting is the fact that at the time I had no idea what a sine function was or even the concept of the area under a curve. A few others in the class may have had a clue but not myself. Somehow I got through this class doing somethings I did not learn for another four or five years while I was in college trying to catch up to start taking some physics classes. I did not take trigonometry or calculus until several years (~1985) into college.


If you look closely enough you can see that I defined Pi as TT instead of PI. That was how naive I was in math....really.


Also note the TRS-80 is an interesting story in itself.

Now nearly thirty years later I am still at it but doing it for physics but this was where it all began.