A business is only as good as its people at work.
My senior year of high school, 1979-80, in an "advanced math
class" we wrote computer logic ... in FORTRAN IV ... onto coding forms that volunteer operators would keypunch onto
cards which they'd attempt to run for benefit of the class. Our programming successes and failures could only become known the
week after! You see, the single computer available in my home town was an iron mainframe at the local independent oil
company. (Yes, such companies existed as late as 1980, but were in process of selling out just about then.)
Actually, thanks to my educator father, prior access to a Commodore
64 and then an Apple II had already led to a lot of fun exploring the "Basic" programming language. So I had played
with branching and iterations and had already suffered my fair share of "infinite loops." To gain early credits
the summer before entering college, I completed a hands-on class in "structured programming" (using the Pascal language)
and a second class about then state of the art computer vector and pixel graphics.
I moved on to college and into the then-top-ranked U.S. architecture school at
University of Michigan. There I used Apple Lisa and Macintosh PCs, as well as University computing mainframe resources.
During the fourth year of my college experience, an incredibly difficult final exam in a computer programming class netted
me a "C+". This was the third highest grade in the class (a majority suffered D's and E's!). So it became
the only "C" I've ever been proud to have earned.
