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Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc

Type: story
Title: Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc
Date: 1970-09-01
Alias: [[Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc]], Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc]], Childhood Computing and Early Career
Category: Origins, Programming, Tektronix, Gladstone

  • Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc

  • I spent the first thirteen years of my life growing up in Gladstone, Oregon.
  • Around age 9 (circa 1970/1971), I had a foundational realization: looking at what I enjoyed at school, I saw a clear overlap between my love of science and my love of mathematics. I reasoned that if I studied computers, I would always be able to get a job.

  • FOCAL on Lined Notebook Paper

    • Because I had no actual computer hardware, I began self-teaching myself Programming by studying a book on FOCAL (DEC's Formula Calculator interactive language).
    • I carefully hand-wrote an entire, syntactically correct FOCAL program onto a sheet of lined notebook paper.
    • I walked over to my father, Ray Schwartz, showed him the paper, and declared: "Dad, this is what I want to do."

  • The ASR-33 Teletype and HP 2000 BASIC

    • Seeing my passion, my parents arranged for me to get access through a local high school teacher's weekend privileges.
    • On weekends, I sat down at a deafening, uppercase-only ASR-33 Teletype terminal connected over phone lines to an HP 2000 BASIC time-shared minicomputer.
    • On that very first Saturday, having devoured the BASIC manual cover to cover, I politely brushed past the teacher's introductory lesson to type in an interactive math testing program I had written beforehand. It executed with zero bugs on the first run. See Testing If the Computer Could Do Math and My First Bug-Free Program.
    • That self-directed weekend exploration unlocked everything that followed in my life.

  • Code for Hire at Age 15

  • The Tektronix and Startup Pipeline

    • That early professional coding immediately opened the door to a five-year tenure at Tektronix (then Oregon's largest employer), working first as the youngest salaried technical writer and later transitioning into full-time software engineering.
    • From Tektronix and Tek Labs, my early career flowed directly into Oregon's booming computing startup landscape:
      • Joining the Magnolia object-oriented database project that spun out of Tek Labs into Servio Logic, which created GemStone.
      • Joining Sequent Computer Systems, the pioneering symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Unix server manufacturer in Beaverton.
  • Looking back, that single piece of lined paper with handwritten FOCAL code set the trajectory for over fifty years of professional software architecture, book authoring, and global tech advocacy.

What links here

🔗FOCAL 🔗Gladstone 🔗HP 2000 BASIC 🔗 Landing at Tektronix at Age 16 Through Uncle's Introduction 🔗 My Childhood Computing and the IMSAI 8080 🔗 My Summer Temp Job at Tektronix and Learning to Write 🔗Sequent Computer Systems 🔗Washington County IED
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.