For Possum's Thursday Three:

The first of all computers that I encountered was through my brother, Charles. When he came home from Vietnam he took the money our mother had saved for him and enrolled at the Control Data Institute. That was 1968. He had a template to help him structure diagrams for data flow.

Remedial learning at Reed was Fortran for physics class, 1975. I was fine with vectors, but not computers. Between that and the white mouse, I dropped out. I'll get to the mouse in a future post.

I was hired off a barroom floor in the Magnolia Building in Dallas, 1984, to document the modeler program for an alternative long-distance company. The program had to do with telephonic switching. I documented that sumbitch thing down to tolerance. The computer I started with was a mainframe DataGeneral. The company sold, to the dismay of many young workers, to General Communications in Kansas. I could be in Ellsworth today. The company became a component of Sprint.

Within a year or two, IBM came out with the OfficeWriter. Here comes my worst experience. I had worked through about 40 pages of if-thens elegantly, and the computer wouldn't take it. It was a horrible blow, and I've left lovers with less effect.

The first computer I owned was the beauty in New York's Museum of Modern Art. ATT, wasn't it? 256 K, as I remember. I'm not a good typist, and wouldn't have graduated without it.