EVENT
My Childhood Computing and the IMSAI 8080
- At age 9 in Gladstone, I made the conscious decision to choose computer Programming as my lifelong career, realizing the intersection of my love for science and mathematics.
- Because I had no actual computer hardware at the time, I hand-wrote an entire program for FOCAL on lined notebook paper and showed it to my father, declaring my intent. See Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc.
- At age 10, my parents arranged weekend access to an HP 2000 BASIC Time Shared system via a noisy ASR-33 Teletype terminal (which printed in strict uppercase!).
- I spent hundreds of self-taught hours at that terminal all the way through the end of high school in La Grande, Oregon, frequently taking over teaching duties for the BASIC Programming class from our official computer teacher.
- By age 15, I was already writing commercial code for hire for the Washington County IED, which set the stage for five years at Tektronix and later joining GemStone and Sequent Computer Systems.
- During high school, I successfully built an IMSAI 8080 computer from a kit for the school's computer lab.
- Academically, I flunked middle-school English and took three full years of Journalism in high school specifically to avoid standard English writing classes, earning points for my typing and page layout skills rather than my prose.
- My only serious journalistic contribution was a front-page article titled "I assembles an IMSAI 8080 for the school." As the chief editor of the paper, I proudly ran it front and center on page one.
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.