I am writing a new book, the working title of which is Digitalis Americana: How the Personal Computer Changes the Face of America.
As I transfer my book from my writer’s notebook to my digital notebook, I will post sections to this blog; I look forward to your constructive feedback in the comments section of each post.
It all started bit by bit.
It all started for me with a father employed by IBM. International Business Machines was the largest employer in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, and I had more than a few friends who had fathers employed by Big Blue. We were an IBM family. Dad felt that he owed much of his personal success to his being fortunate to earn a job with IBM after returning home from the Korean Conflict. IBM paid for our healthcare, and the doctor’s waiting room was cozy with IBM wives and their children. My parents paid for treatment for coughs, fractures, and the assortment of pre-adolescent maladies with blue dollars.
The IBM country club was host for the annual family holiday party, and summertime swimming lessons were given at the country club pool. I even learned to play golf at the club. The IBM softball team kept the younger employees in shape, and both of my parents were ace bowlers, occasionally practicing at club’s lanes.
For me, growing up with the IBM family, I had a picture of an idyllic corporate environment, a place that I would want to work. Dad worked hard, from nine-to-five each day, helping to manage development projects that would eventually end up as huge computers running corporate payroll databases and calculating the trajectories of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space missions. At home, I was secure in the knowledge that IBM and its line of big iron computers would always be there to provide for our family’s needs.
In the 70s, I left home for college and then military service, so I was not living at home to hear first-hand of the changes at the IBM plants in and around Poughkeepsie. The early 80s found Dad transferred to Boca Raton, Florida to work on a new development project that was to become the IBM Personal Computer.
The IBM PC, as most people called it, was to change the face of data processing. Businesses then, just as today, run on data, and although I did not recognize it at first, individual’s lives were to become much more sensitive to data processing needs, as time progressed.
Dad had occasionally encouraged me, in his gentle handed way, to study how computers work: programming and computer science. I wanted to be a high school music teacher, and I had no interest in things mechanical, let alone a data processing device without obviously moving parts. To me, a computer was a mechanical device with hidden components that shuffled decks of 80-column punch cards and made more noise than I cared to hear. Try as he might to encourage me otherwise, Dad kept his promise to support my career choice, and I left to study music education. Ironically, my first choice for music school was on the campus of one of the State University of New York’s premier computer science colleges…it is too bad that while I was at school I still thought computers were noisy and less interesting than playing the French horn and piano.
It was not until a decade after I first left home that I was to come to recognize that a computer could actually be useful to me. In the mid 80s I came face-to-face with a computer, but this time it was on my terms and I had an immediate need to learn how to use the box. I was a graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, taking the writing seminars. It was summer, and anyone who has spent a summer near the Chesapeake Bay knows how humid and muggy it can be. My classes required me to write up to 40 pages of prose each week, sometimes through three revisions. I had an electric typewriter and it was turning into a torture device. My housemate, another serviceman and I, being bachelors and perpetually broke, didn’t turn on the air conditioning—I typed and sweat my way through a set of summer writing seminars. During a visit late that summer, Dad surprised me with the gift of an IBM PC Portable. He had bought it used from IBM, but it became a welcome tool as my writing requirements increased.
The PC Portable was a clunky device with two 5.25 inch diskette drives, 640 KB (Kilobytes) of RAM (Random Access Memory), and a six-inch monochrome monitor: all packed in to a travelling case that weighed more than my overseas duffle bag. Dad and Mom were also thoughtful enough to give me a 12 inch color monitor that sat on top of the luggage-sized case.
In less than an hour, Dad was able to teach me to use the PC Editor software application to type my papers, and from that day on, I’ve only used my typewriter to fill out pre printed forms.
Within a week, I teaching myself WordPerfect and Lotus 1 2 3, two applications that demonstrated true excellence in software programming and application interface design. Within the month, I was learning dBase III Plus, another excellent software application.
I took to the IBM PC like quite like a duck takes to water, but like a drowning man takes to flotsam: I saw the personal computer as a tool that would make my life much easier.
Not only was I beginning to breeze through my academic papers, but I was enveloped in a learning process about a device that I intuitively guessed was changing my life. Within a year, I was teaching undergraduate software classes, and I saw my career laid out before me. I resigned from the military, started a computer consulting practice, and I never looked back, not once—probably because the digital world was coming at me too fast for me to dare take my eyes off the road ahead.
