I was transferred to Dallas in May of 1961 as a Senior Tabulating Machine Operator. Those tabulating machines were not exactly like computers as Ernie Stokes would quickly tell you. Instead of writing programs you had to wire control panels to instruct the dumb machines what to do. In that sense they are the same as computers�..they are useless without instructions!
At that time I had never even heard of a computer and was looking through a trade journal in the manager's office and saw an advertisement on "how to learn computer programming by correspondence." I asked my manager about it and he made the infamous and shortsighted statement of the century. He said "Aw, you don't need to worry about that. Computers will never be used!"
Fortunately I ignored him and signed up for the course. Since I am not the fastest learner in the world and there was no one around who knew anything about computer programming it was quite a struggle at times and it took me almost a year to get through the course. By that time my company was installing their very first computer and they had hired two programmers. One of them kept coming to me for help in writing his programs and it was only a couple of months until they sent him back to his clerical job and replaced him with me!
In those days our computers were huge compared to what we have now. The one we had was called an IBM 1401 with 16K of memory and required a room about forty by sixty feet. Instructions were fed to the computer via punched cards arranged in a very exact sequence, and woe be to the unfortunate one who got a card out of place or heavens forbid, dropped a deck of cards. (And it did happen.)
I imagine that now most people don't even know what an IBM punched card is. For those who don't know, it is a card about three inches high and six inches wide and holds eighty characters of data. Also, a floppy then was some kind of hat or something. The floppy you probably have now is the equivalent of over 18,000 cards.
The 'little bitty" computer I'm using right now has 4000 times as much memory, a 'small' disk drive that contains 20 billion bytes of space and the whole thing fits on top of my desk. So you can see that a lot of progress has been made in the last 40 years and I for one am still amazed at today's computers that most people take for granted. By this time you can tell I am a dinosaur!
I'm sure I could write a book about my 40 years experience in the computer field. Also am sure nobody would want to read it! After about three years as a programmer I was promoted to Systems Analyst, then Programming Manager and then Project Manager. I also had to fly all over the country usually at least once a month to various offices and to seminars. The best trips I ever made were to Puerto Rico to help install their new computer. I tried my best to stay there, but the bosses didn't think that was a very good idea.
In 1982 I acquired a boss who began to make my life almost unbearable. In other words he was a real chickens�.! There was just no way anybody could satisfy the SOB. Just before I was about to lose it completely a friend who had a CPA firm offered me an opportunity I just couldn't turn down and managed to talk my company into letting me take early retirement.
The CPA gave me my own office and helped me to incorporate my company and by golly I became a President without getting a single vote! After a couple of years of driving to and from work it dawned on me that I could do that right in my own home. For several years afterward I developed computer software for businesses and was in hog heaven! Around 1995 I decided that enough was enough and it was time to relax, play and travel.
Bobbye and I then traveled quite a bit including a vacation to Puerto Rico and to the Bahamas. She had always enjoyed fishing, as long as I baited her hook, and had caught fish larger than I ever had. In Nassau I hired a real nice boat for just the two of us (along with the Captain and his helper). Then I caught a 45 lb. Tuna, a thrill of a lifetime for me since the largest thing I had ever caught before was probably less than two pounds.