How I got started

Kasia reminisced about how she got started in computing, and that got me to thinking. Back in 1978 or so, when I was 10, my dad owned a construction company, and he got a contract to build a new store for a local company. Through some magic involving upgrades to the appliance dealer’s office, Dad ended up with a spiffy top-loading RCA VCR and an attached camera. (I could go into lots of old-school technical detail, but I won’t). That in turn got transmuted into a TRS-80 Model I, with the Level II BASIC interpreter and the coveted expansion interface that gave me a whopping 48KB of RAM. Dad & I quickly got in the habit of swilling root beer and computing; we more or less learned BASIC programming at the same time. I quickly got bored with the simple examples that we were getting from Radio Shack’s line of private-label books, but a subscription to 80 Micro soon helped me start brushing up on my Z80 assembler. (I remember being terribly disappointed one Christmas when I got Visicalc instead of the macro assembler I’d really, really wanted).

That junky old computer got me where I am today. I polished my programming skills and spent as much time as my parents would let me hanging out at the local Radio Shack. That in turn led to my first paying programming job: I got $10/hr from Technical Controls Inc (a local oilfield firm) to customize the BASIC accounting package that RS sold for the Model II. TCI also threw in a baseball cap with their logo, which unfortunately got lost some years ago. That job led to others, and I gradually updated my hardware to the point where I could run an actual Pascal interpreter. I didn’t get heavily into Pascal until 1985, after a summer’s worth of keypunching general ledger data on a Compaq “suitcase” PC netted me enough bucks for a Macintosh 128Kb. I didn’t really get serious about the Mac until I read Chernicoff’s Macintosh Revealed books, which inspired me to lay out my own money for a copy of TML Pascal, a real industrial-strength Pascal compiler that was based on Apple’s MPW.
I entered college in 1986 with the expectation of being an aerospace engineer. After a few quarters at college, though, two things became clear: I wasn’t likely to enjoy the required math classes, and the days of Kelly Johnson and Ed Heinemann were past– engineers had what seemed to me to be boring jobs working on small subsystems. I switched my major to information and computer sciences, my reasoning being that I liked doing that kind of work and would enjoy it on a daily basis. College opened up a whole new vista; I learned about software engineering, picked up a wider variety of langauges and platforms, and was able to get a series of interesting part-time jobs working in Modula-2 and Ada. That in turn led to other jobs, doing stuff as varied as writing Ada compilers to maintaining space shuttle experiment software to writing software used for ship design. Eventually, though, I learned that there was too much money to be made writing to spend time coding; it’s been a couple of years since I wrote anything more complex than a code sample. I did get to write some code for my O’Reilly registry books, and I’ve contributed some samples for various Microsoft products. One of these days, though, I’ll get back into it. In fact, the OS X developer tools CD is sitting right next to me, taunting me.