I was a child in the pre-electronic age. Well, actually there were radios, but that was about the extent of it. Then black and white television became available.
I think that I first
came across the idea of computers in the form of "electronic
brains" in science fiction. After my mission I found employment
at Canadian Magnetic Reduction, a company that used an IBM 360
mainframe computer system. Wow! One of my tasks was coding the
invoices so that the computer cards could be punched to create the
invoices for our customers. Our monthly rent to IBM was very high,
but in a good month we could charge our customers a million dollars.
I started learning the Fortran IV programming language, but never
followed it up.
In 1977 "personal
computers" became available in stores: The Apple II, Commodore
PET and the Radio Shack TRS 80 Model I. Judy's cousin Llewellyn in
Calgary bought a TRS 80 system with all the extras. I was fascinated.
In about 1980 The
Alberta Department of Education bought a large number of Apple IIs,
and a couple of them were given to my school the Alberta
Correspondence School. I started teaching myself Applesoft BASIC, the
built-in programming language. Then, one of the other teachers
organized programming classes taught after work in a school with a
computer lab. It was a wonderful experience being with a group of
other teachers learning to create software. I became a charter member
of the Alberta Teachers Association Computer Council.
I bought a used TRS
80 model I from a Radio Shack store and connected it to a 12"
black and white TV as a monitor and a cassette tape recorder for
storage. I wrote a few simple programs and then expanded the memory
to 16 KB. Better computers became available but I could not afford
one. Every month or two I would buy the latest CLOAD cassette which
would have programs for the TRS 80.
On an Apple II, I
wrote a program for teaching the French object pronouns. I entered it
in a programming contest for teachers and won a Commodore 64. Yea! It
had 64 KB of memory, high resolution color graphics, and even a
floppy disk drive. I bought a printer interface and a dot matrix
printer. I joined the Commodore Users of Edmonton (CUE) and attended
their monthly meetings whenever possible.
I wrote a program
"The Haunted Schoolhouse Adventure" teaching the rules of
euphony in French. I entered it in two programming contests and won
an Apple II+ customized by Bell and Howell and an IBM PC jr. This
greatly expanded the range of games and other software available to
me and my family. I joined the Northern Alberta PC Users Group
(NAPCUG). Free software was available from most of the computer clubs
for about $2/diskette. And it was fun to meet with others in the
excitement of those early days of computing.
Over the years, the
PC jr was replaced by more capable computers. often used but
sometimes new. DOS became supplemented by Windows 3 and 3.1, then
Windows 95 which used a graphic user interface, just like the Apple
Macintosh that I often used at work. Then came Windows 98, Millenium,
and Windows NT and so forth.
Up to this point I
had tried programming in other computer languages including Pascal, C
and Comal. But Microsoft BASIC was here I was most comfortable and I
bought compiler software to convert my BASIC code into the more
efficient machine language code. I even created a company to
distribute the software I had written "Forest West Computer
Services", but it didn't go anywhere.
Computers became
important for other family members too. My brother Lloyd became a
computer expert in his own right. My brother Reg made a career of
operating mainframe computers, and selling and servicing computers.
My son Andrew became a computer engineer. And all of us have been
affected by the increasing role that computers and other electronic
devices play in our everyday lives.
When the Alberta
Distance Learning Centre made emailing assignments an option and
started a virtual school in 1997, I became very involved. I taught
computer applications and programming courses in C, BASIC, and
Javascript. Some of these I had developed myself.
This was my high
point in computer programming. After I retired in 2001, I turned my
focus to family history. The computer was a wonderful tool for this
purpose. I could do research online and create compact discs of old
family photos to mail to relatives. I could create my own websites,
blogs and electronic books for family history. I served for 10 years
as a FamilySearch Support missionary, made possible by the computer
and the internet. I loved it!
The computer and I
have come a long way over the years.
