Me and the Computer

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.