Things were much different then as you can imagine but maybe in ways you might not expect. In some ways you could say that people were more ignorant then but in other ways I think you would have to say that people were forced to grow up much faster than now. Often I meet people at 40 who are less grown up than I had to be at age 4 years of age in Seattle Washington in 1952. Why was this? People didn't live as long then. In 1950 people only lived on average to 70 and only 50 years before only 60. It's hard for me to realize that 74 years have gone by since 1950 by the way. I was 4 in 1952. What will happen in the next 70 years? A whole lot more likely than happened since 1950.
A lot more was demanded of us as children in the 1950s and 1960s for a variety of reasons. People believed "rightly or wrongly" that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust and many young people especially killed themselves because they couldn't deal with this.
However, I came from a more pioneer family in how we thought aboutt things. After all, we had been here since 1725 so even before the revolutionary war. So, thinking about ending one's life wasn't as common maybe as now. However, I was facing my own mortality especially from age 18 to 25 when I didn't see fully a way forward that I could live with either. I was 18 in 1966 and I started going to College at Glendale College which is a community college in Glendale California. I majored in Computer Data Processing. I thought maybe I could join IBM then in Los Angeles but I soon found out that you needed a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics then to join them so I gave that up because I was only 18. What did I know?
I first learned how to program in COBOL and FORTRAN. Cobol was and is a Business Language and Fortran literally means "Formula Translation". I liked FORTRAN a lot because it reminded me of my first year Algebra class and I always sort of liked the Algebraic formulas because it put life into some sort of order since chaos was a part of life we always dealt with then too. Chaos seemed to be everywhere then from the Draft and watching friends die in the Viet Nam War who were too ignorant to go to college but not too ignorant to be slaughtered on the battlefield who didn't know much more than how to watch TV or Surf or race cars on the street. So, we felt very sad for friends who didn't realize that by going to college they might not die in Viet Nam even if it was a community college. My best friend went to Glendale College and learned how to service Jet Engines so he could join the Air Force and not die on the front lines in Viet Nam or get Drafted. So, if you were intelligent enough you could find a way even then to survive getting drafted and dying on the front lines. My father insisted that I tell the Draft Board about my seizures as a 10 to 15 year old at night while I was asleep so this gave me a 4F and kept me out of the military draft so I could go to college and try to be whatever I could be.
I remember clearly using an IBM keypunch machine to program a computer to run some of my first programs then. It felt amazing for the computer to do as I had asked by punching in my coding into a punch card in a certain way and then feeding it into a card reader and the computer "hearing?" what I had told it to do. There was an amazing feeling of power when we did this as students then and it began for us thinking in whole new ways that others who had not experienced computers first hand didn't understand or know about fully.
Then I wanted to be working in the computer field ongoing. However, I soon found that it would be 50 to 75 years before I could do exactly what I wanted in the computer field. There were not computer chips or Ram outside of NASA then so it was very cumbersome indeed compared to now.
For example, the laptop you might be reading all this on would take a whole warehouse of computer equipment then and would be much much slower than what you are reading this on now. And Text edictors and microcomputers wouldn't be invented by people like Steven Jobs for another 10 or 15 years then in 1966 also. So, I bought my first home computer which was a 4k computer called a TRS-80 for 800 dollars in 1978 and since my son was 4 years old I began to teach him how to create his own computer games by learning to program in the Basic Language. But, mostly I didn't work in the computer field except for when I worked at Summit University part time and for Glendale Community Hospital for a few months in 1977 and 1978.
I also bought myself a new 1968 Camaro then when I was working for a computer accounting company that did all the bookkeeping for car dealerships all over California at that time. But, eventually I realized when I couldn't do what I really wanted to because technology wasn't advanced as it was on Star Trek on TV that I should do something else. However, computers became a hobby for me ever since and I have kept up with about 20 or more generations of computers and computer science ever since then.
However, my son get angry at me now for not keeping up with operating systems on computers like I used to. However, with technology changing about every month to 6 months now I don't see the point of learning more than you need in the moment if everything is going to change so fast now.
He likes to build gaming computers for playing computer games. He found that belonging to Prime he could get all the parts without paying for shipping which helped a lot. So, he found he could build an exceptional desktop computer for under around 700 dollars. However, this is several years ago now so it might be more expensive now to do this. But, you can still build a Ferrari type of desktop for not a lot of money if you are doing this yourself
No comments:
Post a Comment