Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

During high school I continued to be involved with computers. Yet it was not done to the exclusion of all else. I was on the swim team each year, did my studies taking numerous honors (now called advanced placement) courses, and was interested in photography including developing and printing prints among other things. So I attended a computer club at our archrival high school where the teacher taught FORTRAN. This language was so foreign to me when compared to my initial exposure to the simplicity of BASIC. I especially remember being absolutely bewildered by FORMAT statements. As part of the club some of the students chose to write different programs. One student worked on a dating program which would match people based upon a questionnaire. We mimeographed the questionnaire and passed it out to everyone. I was more fascinated with the answers that the girls had provided. Think of it as a bunch of geeks having a easy way to meet girls. I don’t think his program ever worked though. My programming was less ambitious. I had become interested in hovercraft, a subject that I had picked up from my father who was involved with them at his work. I had built several of them including one in eighth grade even before being introduced to BASIC. My father found a series of articles in an British magazine that analyzed hovercraft design with numerous equations. This was a perfect match for FORTRAN – formula translator. This was done on punch cards – keypunch cards on the IBM Key 026 Punch, load compiler on cards into an 1620 Data Processing System, load your program cards, punch intermediate results, load second pass of compiler, output results on cards, and print a listing on the IBM 407 Accounting Machine. But alas I never finished it and finally I lost interest in it. I feel this is another theme of my life, I don’t always complete things that I start.