I remember my driving to the store with my dad to purchase his first home calculator – it performed addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It even had a memory! Wow.
From there, I moved on to saving my earnings from lawn mowing so that I could purchase my own calculator – the TI-30. It had logarithms, roots – it even had a key for pi. And, with the red LED “letters” you could have fun with the shell oil trick calculation.
I then discovered programming through an ASR-33 teletype in high school, and I knew I had found true love. It could print up to 10 characters per second – all upper case – and had a paper tape punch and reader. This was a thing of pure beauty. My first program was not hello world – that didn’t begin until later with the advent of the C programming language – it was a simple program to print out the numbers from 1 to 10. Mind boggling.
My next big transformation was with the hp 41-C programmable calculator in college. I begged (and begged) and justified my need (I was a CS major afterall) until my parents finally bought one for me – I named it Hewy. Then came the calculator club (yup, I was VP) and synthetic programming (basically hacking on a calculator) and the rest is history.
Many programming jobs later, from accounting and legal software, to healthcare patient monitoring (Spacelabs), to desktop publishing (remember Aldus PageMaker?), and on to the pinnacle (the evil empire, Microsoft), then to AT&T Wireless/Cingular/AT&T Wireless, and finally, moving into eye-tee at my church and as a consultant.
Fortunately, I’m technologically eclectic. I’m a PC, but i’m also an iPhone and iPad, and have programmed on and owned a Mac in the past (anyone remember Shufflepuck?) and may again in the future. I like technology of all kinds – a lot – and hope to share a bit of that passion with you in these pages.
Thanks for looking.