Computer History For Terry Johnson

My first experiences with computers took place with me as a spectator. My younger brother received a small computer from one of our Uncles. I do not remember what model the computer was but I do recall that it used cassette tapes for its programming. If I recall correctly (and this is in some doubt, from listening to child hood stories told by my brother and cross referencing with my own memories, let's just say one of us lived in an alternate universe. I fear it is me, due to the fact that I have very similar experiences with my wife's recollection of events as well. ) it played some basic games on a small black and white screen.

My next experience was described when I read the history of the computer on Wikipedia. I would go to class learn about the formatting of programming. I would receive a worksheet which I would follow to create a program. Then I would tax my typing skills to produce punch cards, a whole stack of these card board rectangles with holes literally punched in them. I then took the punch cards over to this large copy machine looking device called a computer. Here I fed the punch cards into a tray. At this point I would hang around trying to chat up as many girls as I could as we all waited for a large green and white striped printout to come spitting out of the machine with our names on them. This is where it really got exciting, I would lay out the paper and look for areas on the margin were errors where pointed out by the words Syntax Error. Which could have meant many different things but mostly just meant I miss typed one of the punch cards. So back to the typing, stacking, chatting, waiting and finally I would have a green and white striped paper without errors on it. I would proudly take this to the instructor and turn it in for a grade not knowing the slightest how the code I wrote functioned.

I graduated to using the computer as a word processor later in my teaching career. I bought one for my wife when she was going to school at Whitewater while working on her Computer Science degree. I then helped develop a multimedia lab at a school and was well on my way to being a experienced user, who knows very little about how a computer actually works .