CP/M

The first home computer I ever bought ran with a CP/M operating system. It was a small computer, containing two floppy disc drives (a big deal at the time, for which I had to pay extra). The monitor and keyboard were both extra components to be bought. I bought a CP/M system because I wasn't very impressed with the DOS systems that were then available. Little did I know!

At the time, I had a boyfriend named Dave, who was a computer scientist. He bought a DOS computer, which was his first home computer, except for a computer he had built himself. He called it the "POS-1," (standing for "Piece of 'Shit-1). After he bought his first DOS system, he gave the POS-1 to my two younger sons.

Together, Dave and I wrote a book, Algorithms for Personal Computing. Creating the manuscript was difficult, because my CP/M system was different than Dave's DOS system. Dave would write a program in BASIC, then add explanatory comments. I would then take the program, copied onto a 5-1/4" inch floppy disc, and translate it into a format my computer could read. Then I'd edit Dave's text commentaries.

The book is long out of print, and yet, I've found that it now sells in used-book sites for about $45. It was only $14.95 when it was first printed.

ARPANET

While I was working at the Navy research lab, my brother was also working there, as a research scientist in the civil service. In fact, he had been working there for several years. In his work, he was one of the users of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.

ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became DARPA, for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

This early system allowed its users to upload and download files from mainframe computers located at various government facilities and universities. It also allowed users to run programs on computers remotely, and it soon allowed email among the users. I never got to use ARPANET. By the time I got online, the Internet had superseded it.

Punch Cards

While I was working at the Navy research lab, I decided to take a class in the programming language Fortran, which was being offered by my employer. After the first couple of sessions of class, we were given an assignment to write a simple program to calculate our average gas mileage. For the next class session, we were instructed to bring a stack of punch cards with the program punched into it.

At the lab where I was working, I saw a bank of keypunch machines that were available "on demand." So I went there and diligently punched my program into a machine, and picked up my punch cards.

At the next session of class, our instructor took us to a room that contained a card reader, a large, complex machine that would read our punch cards and transmit the information to a mainframe computer somewhere. However, when my deck of cards went into the machine, they simply disappeared. They didn't come back out, and the machine gave no sign of having read them.

The instructor finally figured out that the keypunch machine I used was a slightly different variety than the kind needed for this card reader. I would have to punch a new set of cards on a different machine that was in the corporate building. This annoyed me greatly, because I would have to make a special trip across town from the lab where I worked to the corporate building.

However, before I managed to do that, my mother died. I was so grief-stricken, I didn't have the heart to go through with that class, and so I never learned to program in Fortran, although I was able to read it when I was writing a document for a Fortran program.

Paperless office

Almost immediately after we moved back to San Diego, Don and I decided to get a divorce. With the help of my brother and his wife, I bought a condo near Don's house. I started looking for a job, and soon found one at a company with Computer in its name, although the work I was doing as a technical writer didn't require me to use a computer. At first, I didn't even have any access to a computer.

Then, while I was working for a client of the company at a Navy research lab, we learned about a computer we could access directly, by phone line, and we decided that we'd set up a "paperless office," a dream that remains unfulfilled in any office I know of.

This particular computer was called a PDP-11. I don't know any of its technical capabilities, but I remember that to access it by phone, we used a 300-baud modem, which was so slow it was almost unbearable. However, the computer did have a CRT terminal and keyboard, instead of punch cards and reels of magnetic tape for input and output. My job was to type in the information for the projects we were working on, and format the documents so the manager could easily view them on his terminal. Formatting the documents was very tricky. It required including a lot of codes in the document for line indents, line spacing, and so on. And, of course, in the end, the documents always had to be printed and stored in file drawers. So much for the paperless office.

Microprocessors

After I lost my job at the company that manufactured stand-alone word processors, I was delighted to get a job where I could use my French. I became the department secretary for a special project at a company that manufactured semiconductors of all kinds. The special project was devoted to a contract to design and equip a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Algeria, for an arm of the Algerian government. Part of the contract required training about 50 Algerian engineers and technicians how to operate the new factory that was being built.

As a result, I learned about many aspects of manufacturing semiconductors, although I wasn't using a computer in my job. During this interval, the first microprocessors were being developed -- a "computer on a chip." This meant that the entire circuitry for a computer was now available on one integrated circuit.

However, that didn't mean that all you needed was one
integrated circuit. Oh, no. It needed to connect to other devices for input, output, and storage. While I was working for the semiconductor company, I went to the "company store" and bought a "computer in a notebook" for Don. It was a literal three-ring notebook, containing pages of information and instructions, and a plastic three-ring zip-lock bag containing a small printed circuit board and various semiconductor devices. Don would have to attach the pieces and somehow attach the "computer" to a keyboard and terminal and so on.

About that time we decided to move from Silicon Valley back to San Diego. Once again, Don got a job that would pay for our move. We didn't want to move the kids in the middle of the school year, so Don moved to San Diego and roomed with a friend, while the kids and I stayed in Sunnyvale until the end of the school year.

Large Scale Integration (LSI)

About the time I started working in the electronics industry was about the time Large Scale Integration (LSI) was developing enough to create successful automated production lines that could produce it. It carried much more circuitry than small and medium scale integrated circuits. And manufacturing LSI circuits was very difficult. I once worked at a temporary job as a secretary, where one of my duties was to calculate the total percentages of successful production on different days, using variable procedures. At each step of processing, some percentage of the "chips" on a wafer of silicon failed. And at the next step, some other percentage failed. At each step, the total percentage of failures of total chips on the original wafer became bigger and bigger. The total percentage of successful chips fabricated might be around one percent, or less, of the original potential chips on the wafer.

Word Processing

After I finally completed my B.A., I decided to get a job. All the children were in school by then, and I wanted to do something professional.

I got a job as the "word-processing secretary" with a small company that manufactured a computer system devoted exclusively to word processing. The included a gas plasma screen, "international orange" in color, with white letters. The company had devoted a lot of research to the subject, and decided that the orange and white display was easiest on the eyes. The display was of the WYSIWYG type, years before that term was coined, and years before any other computer system offered it.

A short time after I started working there, a huge international company bought it. But that turned out not to be important to me, because when I came up for my 3-month review, I was let go. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with my work, or even keeping up with my work; it was because I "took off too much time" to take care of my children when they got sick. I don't think that would be allowed now.

I felt devastated, but it turned out that it freed me up to take another job that was ideal for me.