I'm a 69-yr old (as of 2008) retired programmer with a fondness for all of the topics that
appear in this site. We live on a few acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains
of Southwest Virginia.
I developed a love for mathematics and science largely because of Mr. Paul
Bader and Mr. Robert Wellever, two great teachers from my high school days in
Fenton, Michigan.
I regret that I never got back in touch with them to tell them
so. Without them, I probably wouldn't have enrolled in
that first programming class at Michigan State University, on
"Miliac", a vacuum tube behemoth that we programmed (in
Fortran) by punching
programs onto paper tapes. Paper tapes were carried to Miliac and returned the next day along with output paper tapes - which
we carried to the printer so we could print results, find our errors, and try again. Most
programmers today probably have never heard the term "desk
checking". With 24 hour turnaround, one becomes very proficient at
it!
Time passes - I graduated from MSU andI worked a few years for Rocketdyne in California, writing Fortran programs
doing spectral analysis - trying to figure why our F2 rocket engines kept
blowing up. (We did - the F2 powered the first Saturn rockets into space a
few years later). I then worked for IBM for a few years developing BPS Card Fortran that
ran on early System 360 computers. We weren't lucky
enough to get to work on the "big" systems that had tape drives
and 32kb or 64kb of memory (kb=kilobytes=1024 bytes)
- our compiler had to run on a 16kb system! The compiler read in a deck of 80 column punched cards and punched out compiled code on
another deck. As I recall, the compiler deck was made up of 13 smaller
decks - each a phase of the compiler - and made a stack of cards about a foot
high. The Fortran source code deck had to go into this deck between phases
1 and 2. Woe be to the person who dropped the deck! The compiler
phases had to come and go while the program stayed in memory. Disk drives
hadn't been invented
yet. Gosh, just writing this is making me feel a lot older,
The years that followed included stints in Germany, Falls Church and
Richmond, Virginia and finally 10 years with Aramco in Saudi Arabia ending at the time
of the Gulf War. I learned and used Fortran, Assembler, RPG, Cobol,
C, Pascal, and SAS programming languages during this time.
While in Saudi, I learned Turbo Pascal, Delphi's predecessor, while
writing a paper for my Master's degree. An engineer buddy and I collaborated on
TurboExpert - an expert system shell that
diagnosed rotating
equipment problems. Later converted to Delphi, TurboExpert earned me
a
degree and Jim and I a royalty contract with a company that marketed the product
for 12 years. The income from the 6 months spent developing TurboExpert
enabled early retirement for us both. So is it
any wonder that Delphi has a spot reserved on my hearth?
Over the years, I had written many puzzle and game
programs "just for fun". With 8 grandchildren now, I
decided it would be nice to preserve some of them in case
they were ever motivated to use programming to develop
critical thinking (aka problem solving) skills.
Programming is surely one of the best ways to build these
skills (persistence and "divide and conquer" being
the two biggies in my opinion). So,
now you can understand some of the motivation for this site. I'm disturbed by, but understand,
the current Advanced Placement emphasis on C++ with a switch to Java on
the horizon. Their job is to
reflect what most colleges teach so that kids can get credit for some college
classes. I haven't heard anyone try to
defend C++ as the best first programming language. Or the
advantage of taking college classes from teachers who are generally not
as qualified as those employed by colleges and universities. And sometimes it
really does pay to
take the road less traveled. Gary Darby |