I was thinking about computer programming, and how little of it I do these days. The subject came up because I took a trip to Raleigh a few days ago to meet some old business (read: programming) friends for an entirely different reason - Corvettes. It seems that most Corvette owners these days have gray hair; but, I digress.
My first attempt at programming was a disaster. I was in the Engineering curriculum at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. Computer programming was a mandatory first term freshman course. Our first project was to write a program in the Fortran language having something to do with the intersection of two lines. I had very little trouble with the language itself, but I just couldn't get my mind around the problem. Perhaps the thrill of being independent for the first time, and first experiences with the demon rum (well, gin and beer) diverted my thinking. The challenge from our professor was to write the program in as few lines of code as possible; I thought I did a passable job until the results were shown to the class - my effort was miserable compared to some. I got through the course, and put ideas of programming aside for a while, partially because of the very limited access to computers in those days.
As I have reported previously in some of my columns, I did some minor hacking and troublemaking throughout the remainder of my college years. But by the time I graduated, I had crossed the threshold - I had gone from novice to expert. When I reported for work at IBM they gave us all a Programming Aptitude Test and I got excellent marks. I found that the skills I had were uncommon compared to most of the other new employees, and I rapidly built on that skill base even though as an engineer I was never in the programming side of the business.
But there were others of my ilk, and rapidly through some kind of non-verbal communications, we found each other. Various hacking projects ensued, sometimes with unanticipated results. A friend and I once took down an experimental timesharing system by creating a circular reference (don't ask - it's complicated) but we escaped undetected and unpunished. I often received calls from the computer center when one of my pet projects used more resources than allowed. The personnel at the library where all the systems and programming technical manuals were stored came to know me well.
After 10 years at IBM, I knew all the systems and all the languages. I was what was called a "recreational programmer" - just doing it for the fun of it. Then came the PC and I was at last able to both hack both during the day and at home. Wow! Between PC hacking and ham radio it's a wonder that my wife and kids ever saw me. Over the next 15 years I wrote and released to the world many PC programs - some more successful than others. Of particular note were my TRS-80 program that could identify and copy any tape (they used cassette tapes for storage in those days), my personal database program (Blister), my MIDI music program (BSMusic), and my word processing program (Script/PC) among many others.
Then came MS Windows. Windows programming was of a completely different sort - often visual in nature. If you wanted, say, a checkbox in a window, you just dragged-and-dropped a checkbox object onto your development window - you didn't actually write any code for it. Boooorrrring.
The second roadblock came in the form of my semi-retirement and that there just wasn't any requirement at all in the local area for programming skills.
And so after almost 40 years as an active programming, my pencil has become dull. Oh, I still do a bit when I need a utility to do something, but mostly I am now a user of somebody else's stuff just as we all are.
Well, perhaps when I REALLY retire…
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)