When I was 18

 I went to Glendale College and there were required courses to transfer to a 4 year institution. I basically chose to go to a community college because it was so incredibly less expensive and because often you get a much better education especially your first two years of college. Why?

Because in a 4 year institution often you are put in core classes where you have 500 to 1000 students. In a class like this you never even meet the Professor even once. You will ONLY see in person where you can talk to them your Teaching assistant (usually a junior or senior student working their way through college). So, by going to a community college you get attention and can talk personally usually with all of your professors in college.

However, I was raised as a Creationist at home (a scientific Creationist) but still a creationist. So, though I was technologically ahead of most people I knew especially regarding computers and already being a trained electrician by my father from ages 12 to 17 I was still a creationist at least at that point in my life at age 18.

So, when I took a required Social Science Class I was very distressed to see that people in my class mostly believed in the Darwin theory of evolution. If you are going to college today you might not understand this but when I was coming up everyone was very religious and even if they weren't people would look sideways at them and they often looked sideways at anyone who wasn't a full on Christian too.

Even in Grade school we had I think on Tuesdays it was where a whole afternoon kids went to their churches as a part of the public school program. I didn't go anywhere because my church was too far away in Los Angeles about 1/2 hour by Car. So, only those children who actually went to church in Glendale where I grew up from 8 to 21 actually went to a Sunday school type of program set up for Tuesdays for public School children.

So, this social Science class was very disturbing foe me at that time. So, I dropped out of school because I was upset about this then within two months of starting college.

However, it took me about 3 years to really deal with this by realizing that neither the Darwin Theory or the Creationist theory are factual. They are both at best theories especially then.

So, what I realized is that I didn't really have to believe in either of them because they were not necessarily factual either one.

But, it took me about 3 years to get to this point. So, I was 21 before I worked all this out to my personal satisfaction.

So, I got a job at a place called Ingledue Travel publications that existed then and I went to work full time in the mail room trying to take a semester off of college to recover from all this.

However, by Christmas my mother needed an operation and my parents didn't have health insurance (which was very common then) So, they asked me to work another 6 months through the summer to pay for my mother's operation. I agreed to do this for them because they needed my help for my mother to survive all this.

So, I wound up working until September 1967 in order to go back to college then. also, I was more mature then and knew I wanted to study computer science and computer operations and computer programming. Also, I had tried to work at IBM but I couldn't unless I had a degree in college of mathematics and that was the last thing I wanted was a degree in Mathematics.

So, I went and studied COBOL programming language and FORTRAN programming language both of which are still used today because of their speed of processing information which is much much faster than present day programming languages. 

The reason for this is that they are much closer to machine language than most languages so much much faster at processing.

 So, then I got a job at the Glendale board of education processing IQ tests using their IBM 1620 Mainframe which I had been trained on and I was also trained on the IBM 360 Mainframe too then in 1967. The way they did it then is you had a mainframe computer worth likely 100,000 dollars or more with what is called dumb terminals (which means they can only send and receive information from the mainframe and have no real intelligence themselves.

Later I got another job automating a Foremost McKesson warehouse where products were stored for places comperable to CVS or RiteAID or Long's used to be like this too.

Then we used punch cards one for each item being bought or restocked so we always knew what items had been sold or shipped to a CVS type of place.

About this time I bought a new 1968 Camaro but what is funny now I couldn't have afforded this car unless I lived rent free at my parents house. This was an amazing car that I fell in love with before I bought it. It could do about 145 miles per hour and cornered better than any American Car I had driven that much and yes I actually drove that fast in this car at one point on Interstate 10 then heading towards Yucca Valley with Friends to a UFO Conference at Giant Rock in 1969 in the fall.

But, that is another story too.

Anyway, College taught me a lot but what it also taught me is that I could not do with computers what I wanted to for around 50 to75 years like about now. So, I eventually decided to give up that profession because it was just too tedious often the work because everything was done by batch then.

There was no random access memory then or computer chips except at NASA in space ships or the military then.

One of the interesting facts that stuck with me all these years is that by the 1970s an American Satellite from Space could read the date on a dime on the ground anywhere on earth. This truth sort of blew my mind at the time and still does.

However, if they did that then, "What can they do now?" 50 years later? 

IN 1966 to 1968 or 1969 your laptop you use every day would have cost about 1 to 2 million dollars then and only would be able to work in a large warehouse without any windows so people couldn't see the equipment and want to steal it.

So, working on punch cards in the 1960s was very primitive indeed compared to today.

And A smartphone would have been unthinkable then too unless you were watching the Star Trek series on TV or reading Dick Tracy Comics in a local newspaper then.