Peter's Random Thoughts

I was twelve when I had my first interactions with computers. My father was the provost at a small college where they had an IBM 360 Model 40 and an IBM 7090. My father realizing I had an interest in computers introduced me to the head of the computer science department. He, in turn, loaned me some early programming books [which I still have] on FORTAN IV and set me up with a usage account for the IBM 7090.

I taught myself how to program in FORTAN IV, it being my preferred programming language for next few years. I also learned how to use an IBM 029 Key Punch [and got much better when I took a typing course when I was 15]. I can't honestly say I was doing anything useful. I was, for the most part, playing around with various problems derived from my math and science classes in school.

We moved to Houston between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. My high school had Teletypes in the math classrooms which were tied to a CDC [Control Data Corporation] 6600 at the University of Texas in Austin. It was then that I learned two things, how to program in BASIC and how much I disliked working with paper tape programs. Unlike the punch cards I started with paper tape being a continuous strip made error correction difficult at best. On the other hand the Teletype enable a rudimentary form of real time interaction. One of the first programs I wrote a simple encoding/decoding program that did simple character substitution based upon a hard coded table.

Late in my sophomore year of high school I was recruited to join a special interest Explore Post [Exploring is a co-ed program of the Boy Scouts of America] sponsored by the Exploration Division of Humble Oil [now known as Exxon-Mobile].  In this case the special interest was computers and the advisers were drawn from the system support staff of the I/T department. For the next two years I and the other members of the Post had evening and weekend access to one of the biggest computers IBM made at the time, an IBM 370 Model 165-II. It was during this time that I learned IBM PL/1 and IBM 370 Assembly language. I hung out with the systems support staff when they were making changes to the various systems and learned the ins and outs of being mainframe support person. By the time I finished high school I had a good working knowledge of how the operating system [IBM OS/360-MVT] worked and how it was maintained.

That was thirty plus years ago and I look back now and realize that this introduction to the IBM Mainframe set the underpinnings for my future career.