I started on a commadore 64 in highschool.
10 ( some command here)
20 print such and such
30 goto 10
hit enter and the screen fills with what ever you printed. Ooh that was so cool !
That was back in the 80s. Long live rock n roll!

 

I've only been messing with computers since the mid 70's or so. When I went to vocational school for mechanical drafting and machine design there were a lot of girls that went to the computer classes to learn how to make the punch cards to feed into the computer.

The school had made the investment of a large IBM punch card computer. I don't think there was any real programming involved but I could be wrong on that because I simply was not interested in that field at that time.

A few months after I started school I had the first hand held pocket calculator anyone had seen in the area. I paid $199.00 for it at the Gambles store. It was a Texas Instruments machine. It did not have a % key nor any memories. The display was red segmented LED's and it only displayed 8 digits.

Just a few years later my bank gave me a credit card size one that did a lot more and had an LCD display and a solar panel to keep it charged. The TI took like 6 AA batteries and could kill them in just one day if you forgot to shut it off.

The math department did get an Olivetti PC that was a true bugger to program. It ran a variation of basic with peek, poke, if, and then, commands. It was OK with me because I had never seen machine language before in my life, no one had so it was all brand new to all of us. There was no screen or display at all, just a paper tape that you printed everything on. You could use up a roll of paper just trying to get a program to run on it. Cutting edge at the time.

It wasn't to long before I got a VIC20 and started messing with that. The first successful program I wrote for it was to find the values of OHM's law. You could enter any two of the variables and it would find the third all on its own.

Later I upgraded to an Apple IIe naturally the programs that ran in the VIC did not work in the Apple so I had to write a new programs.

I subscribed to a lot of computer magazines back then and was always entering new programs from the books then might spend a week or more trying to get it to run. A lot of them had mistyped lines of code in them and you didn't get the corrected program for months sometimes.

Then I upgraded to my first IBM clone with an actual hard drive in it. I bought a modem and could get online in my limited way. There were no ISP's in the area at all, I don't think they had invented the word internet yet either, so I paid a lot in long distance charges for a while there. But I could go keyboard to keyboard with others folks that had one and there were a few colleges that had intranets that you could call into and use.

There was a local BBS that I spent way to much time on.

Once I got the IBM clone I bought Lotus 123 and promptly made a searchable spread sheet to log my ham radio contacts in. I made a searchable spread sheet for a local junk yard so they could look on the computer to see if they had different parts on hand and where they were located. It streamlined their business nicely.

I know making a spread sheet with off the shelf software isn't really programing but it was kinda sorta.

 

I have to laugh a little when people talk about using a computer in high school. Heck all we had was a typewriter and everyone thought it was KOOL when we got the ball type typewriters instead of the key type. We didn't even have a word processor. Heck we were still putting cap on typewriter keys as a prank. I didn't get my first computer until the mid 90's. I use to mess around on friends computers. I had a neighbor that had a Commodore 64 that I played on. But that was about it.

I guess I am showing my age.

 

When my daughter got to middle school they got all the high schools 'old' Apple computers to use. The high school had upgraded to IBM computers that ran the more industry standard windows operating systems.

Personally I thought it was just silly to even start teaching them on the apples since they would be going to windows in just a few years.

I still have my apple and it still works {as far as I know} so I was able to help her learn stuff for the apple.

By then I had upgraded to a P120 made by Acer. I had an encyclopedia and a dictionary disk for that machine so we could look up more stuff with it. We still didn't have a local ISP when she started high school in 2000 but by mid term I did have dialup.

When we did her first paper using the internet for history class the teacher gave her a D for grade. I went in to see why such a nice paper all nicely typed, printed, and used the correct format and credits given was graded so low the teacher said she did not think my kid had what it takes to prepare it.

It was true that she did not actually type most of it but she read everything we found on line and decided what to use and rewrote a lot of it in her own style. Very little of it was simple copy and paste, I reorganized it some for the final draft but I would have done that even if she had hand written it all.

Then the teacher said it was not fair for the rest of the class who did not have access to the internet to do the same. I pointed out that a lot of her class had a full set of new Encyclopedia Britannica at home and we only had a very old set of Funk and Wagnall's. {printed in the 20's before world war two}

She finally upgraded it to a B-, still not the grade I was hoping for but good enough.

 

After I graduated I took a 6 week typing course trying it was 3 hours on Wednesday nights, through the vocational school in Ricelake Wisconsin, to improve my typing ability. I had the Vic 20 at home and a dot-matrix printer and it would work as a typewriter but sometimes I would have a full line written and the printer would only be about halfway a long and that was with hunt and peck.

I usually set it up so I could type a full screen of text before having it print anything so I could proof read it. The typing class was held at the local high school. They still had two class rooms full of manual typewriters and another where they kept the electric ones. The way the instructor had it set up you 'learned' on the manual machine before you were allowed to use the electric.

I bought an fairly nice used Sears manual portable {that I still have} and later bought an IBM Selectric with the legal size carriage that I gave to my mom when she decided to learn to type.

It got hard to find the red and black ribbons so I bought a bottle of black rubber stamp ink and converted the ribbons to just black. Then a few years ago I found a box of a dozen new red and black ribbons on eBay and bought them.

I didn't actually learn to touch type until I got on JUNO the free e-mail service and my younger sister who was taking a computer class in college started e-mailing me every day.

I have no clue how many characters I can type {correctly} in a minute but I can hammer away at the keyboard for a long while at a time and soon enough I have lots of lines typed. It really helps that the computer will spell things correctly for me most of the time.

Being a ham radio operator in my spare time I tried to copy code and type it at the same time but my code reading abilities lack way to much. A lot of my friends learned to type messages off the air when they were in the military so its just second nature for them. They call that 'copying to the mill'.

Of course the military doesn't use Morse code anymore, its either voice or electronically encoded these days. They do still use encrypted codes in both voice and digital modes.

 

So I've mentioned how gas prices have been dropping in the area, still hovering the $1.99/G mark at most places, filled up 5 days ago, saw the gas needle start to drop faster than normal and that had me worried, but I managed another 5 days back and forth to work on 1 tank of gas, currently at 329.7 miles on the tank and still have around 1/4 tank left.

Quite surprised.

With school starting and the summer winding down traffic the last few weeks has started to ease off, so the usual 2+ hour drive home on Friday's took 1 hour, only about 15-20 minutes over the normal no traffic time.

 

Welp ended at 345 miles on that tank and still had 1/8 tank left.

Cost $43 to fill up as well...

 

I cant remember the last time it was under 2 dollars. Would love to see gas here under 2 bucks. Right now its 2.26 . Come on baby keep dropping!

 

What have you done to your truck for better milage? Or did you change your driving style?

 

Didn't do anything.

I drive 35 miles (each way) up and down I95 for work, speeds between 60-70MPH, and some around down traffic at home.

Running 17s and a bad alignment....

I'd hate to see what she'd get if everything was like new....