Gladstone and Colton School Days

The Gladstone Computing Grind (Grade 1 to Grade 9)

• I grew up in Gladstone attending grade school and junior high through ninth grade.
• While my initial access to the ASR-33 Teletype at age 10 was limited to 8 to 10 weekend sessions with a supervising computer teacher, by the second year my access was expanded across the entire school year.
• In ninth grade, I was finally attending the school building that physically housed the terminal.
• I spent almost every waking free moment locked inside a tiny room with an ASR-33 Teletype and two chairs:
  • Early mornings before school started.
  • Mid-morning class breaks.
  • Every lunch hour.
  • Two full hours after school let out every afternoon.
• The deafening, mechanical roar of the 110-baud impact printer in that enclosed room likely contributed to permanent hearing loss in later life—but the immersion was invaluable. I bought every HP BASIC and programming book I could find, typing in massive programs and teaching myself the deep fundamentals of computation.

The Move to Colton and the Leased-Line Bridge (Grades 10 to 12)

• Between ninth and tenth grade, my parents moved our family 26 miles away to rural Colton, where I attended Colton High School and graduated early with the Class of 1978.
• Cut off from my Gladstone friends by expensive long-distance phone toll charges, I discovered that Colton High School shared a leased data line to the same central HP 2000 BASIC host.
• I programmed a homemade real-time chat and store-and-forward email system on the central computer called IDES (Interactive Data Exchange System), prompting my friends to gleefully warn: "Beware the Ides of Schwartz!" See Inventing Chat and Email Across a Leased Line in High School.
• During the summer of 1977, funded with a Sol-20 and Pennywhistle 103 Modem from my maternal grandmother Lorene Pickett, I dialed into Reed College's PDP-11 running Unix V6, discovering Unix and C. See First Unix Experience in 1977.
• In January 1978, at barely 16 years old, I graduated early from Colton High School and moved into the Beaverton basement of my uncle Earl Pickett Jr to begin my career in the Silicon Forest. See Landing at Tektronix at Age 16 Through Uncle's Introduction.