My first shot at "Computers"
My post high school educational career began at the Barnes School of Business in Denver, Colorado, where I learned to wire jumper boards on IBM 402 tabulators, operate the gang punch and the sorter-collator. For almost a year I tried to get a job in data processing but failed because even though I was nineteen I looked fourteen.
Later that fall I enrolled in York College, York, Nebraska. York was a Junior college at the time. June and I met at York College when I was a sophomore and she was a freshman. We were married the following December. After York College, June and I moved to Abilene, TX, where I enrolled in Abilene Christian University, majoring in education and chemistry. My goal in life was to be a high school chemistry teacher. I supported my family and worked my way through the 3rd and 4th years of college by working as an analytical chemist for Bradford Labs, a subsidiary of the Calgon Corp. It was during this time that our two children were born.
On to Graduate School
I quit at Calgon after I was offered a Robert A. Welch research grant to attend graduate school and study anti-cancer metabolites. In 1968 I earned an MS in biochemistry with minors in math, physics, electronics and biology. I didn't find an effective chemical bullet for cancer, but I did discover a way to produce 3-Amino-3,4-dihydro-1-hydroxycarbostyril in bulk at high purity. It is a non-toxic, broad spectrum anti-biotic active at 1 mg per 1 kg body weight and was considered for manufacturer by Merck before they realized that all work done under a Welch grant is public domain, so they couldn't patent it. One of the classes I took in graduate school was Numerical Analysis, the equivalent of computer science in 1967. In that course I learned Fortran 64 and learned to program using a CDC 660 mainframe and a Honeywell 200 mini computer.
Out into the Real World
York College invited me to return as an Associate Professor of Natural Science at $2,000 per year less than what the Welch Foundation grant paid me to do research! Teaching at a church related school puts one in the "Early American Poverty" income bracket, but my wife and I were aware of that. She became the primary "bread winner", earning three times what I made teaching at York College, when we became house parents for 8 to 18 year old boys at a Methodist orphanage called "Mother's Jewels Home". Here is an interesting description of the home, written in 1891 and beginning about half way down the web page: http://www.rootsweb.com/~neresour/OLLibrary/Hist_York/hycp054.htm
Doing What I was Trained To Do
When the college fell upon hard times the last hired were the first let go. I found a teaching job at Clarks High School, in Clarks, Nebraska. I was also asked to be the acting principal. We moved into the oldest house in Merrick county, five miles South West of Clarks and about 1/2 mile north of the Platte river. The ten years I spent teaching at Clarks were the most enjoyable of my career as a teacher. Living out in the country, amid the wild life and away from the city noise, helped make it so. The 1973 Arab oil embargo put the price of propane at $1.50 per gallon. That old house wasn't insulated and I found that we were burning close to 400 gallons every 5 or 6 weeks. I was bringing home only about $800 per month. I also noticed that in the area there were lots of wood lots with dead trees in them so I installed an Ashley "Warm Morning" wood burning stove. A Beautiful piece of machinery. One load of wood at 11PM would keep the two store house toasty till 7AM, even in the middle of January. We look back at that period with fondness, and were thankful that electric heat tape kept the water pipes and toilet from freezing if fire went out while we were gone.
Digital Calculators Appear
I built an analog computer for use in my physics and math classes at Clarks,in 1974, and later an SR-52 programmable calculator (http://www.rskey.org/sr52.html ) that used magnetic strips to store 224 steps of program code and data. I wrote a program to predict the maximum altitude for multi-stage Estes rockets. It required three magnetic strips to store it all and was published by Texas Instruments. The month I made my last payment, and during the last of the final semester exams, my SR-52 grew legs and walked away. I replaced it with an HP-55 and first learned about Reverse Polish Notation. It's predecessor, the HP-65, was programmable and the HP Journal introduced it as "The Personal Computer" long before that term had become common.
A Real Computer Arrives
During the summer of 1978 I spent every Saturday at the Team Electronics store in Grand Island setting at the Apple II+ on display in the front of the store. I taught myself how to program using Apple Basic, which was far different from the Fortran that I learned in graduate school. Just before school started they offered the Apple to me at cost and included a deal: if I came in on Saturday afternoons and demonstrated the Apple I could have a 64KB memory board, Disk II's and a Centronics 749 printer to use, plus I would get 50% of the net profit on each computer and peripherals the were sold. My first sale was for an Apple II+ with a Panasonic TV, two Disk IIs and a Centronics 749 printer, which totaled to $5,000, without software. I agreed to write the software. At the time I was the highest paid teacher at Clarks, but for that one sale my share of the profit was nearly three times what I was bringing home each month as a teacher. The tail was beginning to wag the dog.
Getting on TV
One of the programs I wrote was to score and rank teams in the Clarks 16 Team Invitational Wrestling tournament, one of the biggest in the state, at the time, for class D teams. This led to an invitation by the State Athletic Commissioner to score and rank the three day State Wrestling Tournament. Scoring and ranking had previously required almost a dozen people and a lot of coordination. My son, in the ninth grade at the time, ran the program and I watched the action. For the about three hours on the first day they passed the referees results to the ranking staff and when the staff was done the results were given to my son. Within seconds he had entered the data and the printer had printed out the new scores and rankings before manual calculations were completed. Nebraska Educational Television mounted a camera in front of the printout and left it there. All discrepancies that arose were settled in favor of the computer results. Before noon the staff were given complimentary tickets and told they wouldn't be needed any more. For the next year my phone rang off the hook and I was invited to attend several computer shows, give demos, etc. Apples, ELFs, IMSAIs, Spheres, Sinclairs, and some whose names I no longer remember. Kearney State Teachers College hired me to teach BASIC programming in Adult Ed evening classes for teachers. I had great hopes for roll of computers in education in Nebraska. Time has proven such was not to be.
Taking the Big Leap
In the spring of 1980 I said good-bye to public school teaching and entered a partnership with the owner of Team Electronics. We acquired marketing and sales rights for a 12 state area to sell an artificial intelligence device called SAVVY. I was also involved with the development and testing of SAVVY. Over the next nine months I sold nearly $400,000 in Apples and peripherals and $365,000 worth of SAVVY devices. I wrote the GAAP software package that was shipped with the SAVVY product, and used it for a short time as the core of
my consulting business later on. During 1980 I also acquired my private pilot license.
Back to College
In 1987 a former York College colleague, who had become academic dean, called and asked me to teach science and computer programming again at the college. Knowing how much they paid, I replied that I would provided I could continue my consulting business. Within a couple of weeks the president of the college asked me to computerize the college, which I also agreed to do. I also helped raise funds for and installed a brand new computer science lab with a dozen new 486 PCs and something called Windows. They were hooked into the ethernet backbone I had setup around campus to connect the faculty and staff computers. Also, during that time, I was asked by the local and state law enforcement agencies to do forensic work on some homicides that had taken place. For the next 8 years I applied lasers, calculus, physics, chemistry and computers to analyze evidence collected at various crime scenes. I was elected runner up Teacher of the Year twice. One of my calculus teams ranked 40th in the nation in a national math competition held by the "Consortium For Mathematics and its Applications". I also consulted with local businesses and county agencies.
A Student Again
In 1995 my wife asked me to take only local clients and avoid the travel "because we don't need the large income anymore", or find other line of work. I decided to re-enter high school teaching and took classes at UNL to reactivate my teaching certificate. I spent the next year substituting around the city and county. I realized that a lot had changed in education during the 15 years I was out of it, except for one thing. Most of the computers were still 10 or 15 year old Apples! I also had an opportunity to substitute teach at some private schools. The difference was amazing. The students at the private schools reminded me of those in the public schools twenty years ago, while public school students reminded me of 'Blackboard Jungle'. I had already donated a lot of my time to private schools and no longer felt comfortable in public schools, so 'retired' my dream of returning to teaching and instead I returned to consulting.
A New Career and the Secret to My Success with VFP
One of my local clients happened to be the Nebraska Department of Revenue. As my three month contract was coming to a close the department head asked me to work full time for the department. I was happy to accept and began a new job as a systems analyst/programmer in January of 1997. I had never used Visual FoxPro before so I began a crash course to learn how to use it. Searching around the internet for online tutorials I came across something called the "Universal Thread". It was exactly what I was looking for! I was able to ask questions and have them answered by professionals. Mountains became mole hills. I came up to speed so quickly in VFP that my co-workers thought I was a genius! Then I told them about UT and destroyed the illusion! The $70 investment was trivial compared to the benefits recieved. UT is also good for learning about where the edges of development trends are, without risking too much time or money on unfruitful tools or methods. The fact that the VFP development team keeps an eye on UT means that opinions expressed on UT and problems posted to UT are going to reach the development team much quicker. Would it be stating too much to say that VFP is alive today because of UT? I don't think so. Working at the Department of Revenue has been very enjoyable. Two years ago my son was hired by the state (on his own merits -- he is a better programmer than I am!) and we have even worked on some of the same projects. What a joy! My coworkers are great to work with, the projects are interesting and the tools are state of the art. In May of 1997 I installed a Linux distro on my computer at home, and now it is the only OS on both of my computers at home. Last September we installed a SuSE 6.4 at work and it has run faultlessly every day since then. Now, if I can only talk them into switching totally to Linux. Think of how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees, upgrade costs and lost time due to crashes it will save the tax payers. Sooner or later, it will happen. You guessed it.... I am a Linux Geek!
