One of the ways to begin to understand the problems of the 4th industrial revolution is to learn to program a computer

When I first learned to program computers I was going to Glendale College in Glendale California. I learned to program in Fortran and in Cobol when I was 18 years old. By the time I was 19 I was working for the Glendale Board of education part time processing IQ tests for the children going to school in Glendale using an IBM 1620 computer connected to punch card equipment. A 1620 computer is an IBM Mainframe which eventually was replaced by the IBM 360 as the main workhorse of the late 1960s and 1970s all over the country. What I wanted to do then really was to build robots. But, as I studied more I began to realize that I was 50 years too soon to do what I wanted to regarding this. So, by the time I was in my early 20s I stopped working in this field after working starting at the board of education, and working at Foremost McKesson automating a drug store warehouse and then working at Reynolds and Reynolds which was an automated accounting firm for Auto dealerships throughout the state of California at that time. So, by the time I was 20 I was making so much money I could afford to buy myself a brand new 1968 Camaro that could go 145 miles per hour (I actually drove it that fast then).

But, what this taught me was how to flow chart, how to program computers in Fortran and Cobol, and how to operate the IBM 1620, 360, Optical Scanner Univac computer of that time, all IBM punch card equipment like keypunch machines, sorters, reproducers, Accounting machines, etc. etc. etc.

So, I was working with millions of dollars of equipment. But looking back it's sort of funny because most computers like my Macbook pro laptop are now much faster than the millions of dollars of equipment I worked on then. And you had to work someplace without any windows under fluorescent lighting so people wouldn't break your windows and steal your millions of dollars of equipment you were working with then from 1966 until 1969 around that time. So, by the time I was 21 or 22 I had a new 1968 Camaro but realized this field wouldn't take me where I personally wanted to go which was very sad for me at the time.

But, what it eventually led to was that I learned I liked to own businesses a lot by the time I was 28 and owned at least 4 to 5 businesses by the time I was 45 years of age.

I bought a TRS-80 from Radio Shack in 1978 for 800 dollars which was my very first home computer and then I taught myself the Basic computer language to program with this computer. And then starting in 1980 I taught my son and my step children all to program games into the TRS-80 and then in 1987 I bought an IBM Clone AT computer and an epsom Color Printer for about $2500 in silicon valley and our family was on it's way into the home computer age for real. So, then I taught the whole family to program using MS-Dos which likely was my favorite computer operating system I ever owned because most versions after that allow you only to do less and less at a higher speed than before. MS-Dos even allowed you to program in basic easily then so you could easily write computer games using MS-DOS like I showed my children how to do this on our IBM AT Clone.