COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE AND TRAINING FROM THE PROSPECTIVE
OF A 1956 CLEAR LAKE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE
(Written by Ron Gerdes)
Did our education at CLHS in the 1950's prepare us for the future? I think the answer is, YES. Mr. Howard Noble was the first futurist I dealt with and most of his predictions have come true. Miss Irma Goldberg told us many times that a skill in typing would help us the rest of our lives. How true that is, especially in the past decade. Mr. Noble predicted that the City of Clear Lake would connect to the city of Mason City within 20 years. He said that Highway 18 would no longer be a highway and would be a street with businesses on both sides all the way to Federal Avenue.
I had a friend from Minnesota that was in the top 5% of the country in his data processing and programming skills. That was in 1980. Today, he is in the lower 5%. I used to think that I was quiet knowledgeable in the skills of data processing, however, that feeling quickly disappears within several days. Every time a person thinks he knows about computers there is someone coming up behind him that makes him feel very inadequate.
My first experience in data processing was submitting transmittal forms to a computer service bureau. These forms were "key punched" for reading into a central processing unit. The first piece of equipment I used was in 1967 and it was called a Friden Flex-a-Writer. Yes, this is a piece of equipment developed by the Friden Sewing Machine Company. The Flex-a-Writer punched holes in a ½ inch paper tape. I think it was called 8 bit processing. Each key stroke punched a series of holes in the tape that became an alpha or numeric character. The operator sat at a key board of the Flex-a-Writer during daylight working hours and set up the tape to read through a phone. In the middle of the night when the central processing unit was ready for the data, it would dial the phone to activate the tape. The tape would run through the phone reading the data into the computer. I thought I was on top of the technology world with the Friden Flex-a-Writer. Today it is a joke to even talk about it. I could not have used a Friden Flex-a-Writer if it was not for the typing and accounting skills taught by Irma Goldberg.
The next step into world of computers was in 1976. The office I managed purchased 10 Digital Deckwriter II's. We called them terminals, which they were, but they did not have a display screen (CRT). Each key stroke was displayed on continuous feed paper. Many of you remember the pile of tractor feed computer paper that sat under each Deckwriter II, about the same place where you put your feet. The cabling from each unit went under the floor and connected to a Multiplexer. The Multiplexer received all the information from each terminal and combined it into one out going line that ran at 900 Baud. That can be broken down to mean that the Multiplexer communicated with a computer at 90 characters per second. Relating that to Miss Goldberg's best student could type 65 words per minute seemed very fast to me. In the 1970's, the Multiplexers were in real time. That means that each Deckwriter took 150 baud of the 900. Multiplexers were about the size of a refrigerator and were expandable up to 7200 Baud. Today, there are still Multiplexers that are in place at your internet provider. They are usually manufactured by Cysco Systems. I wonder how many Deckwriters were in use at Clear Lake High School in the late 70's and early 80's?
I can remember my first e-mail message was to an operator of a Dec II in Houston, Texas. My first message was "Hi, How Are You?" I almost fell off my chair when I received the response, "I am fine. How about You?" My message went through a computer in Atlanta and was received by an operator in Houston, TX. WOW ! ! I thought I was really smart.
The next step was to get rid of the Deckwriters and go to Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). This was just a short step away from having a Personal Computer (PC) at each employee's desk. This came with the first advent of Laser Printers. Many stories can be written about the sharing of the printers.
I remember talking to an IBM engineer about the printers in use at the plant in Rochester, Minnesota. He told me that they had a printer that required a piece of equipment attached to the ceiling to keep the paper from going through the roof. This was just before the development of Laser Printers. The tractor, line feed, of those printers was over 500 lines per second.
The next computer that I got involved with was the IBM System 36 in 1983. This is the first computer that I stored data on a disk and not the magnetic tapes of the System 32 and System 34. The disks were 10 inches in diameter and the machine held about 10 of these disks. I don't remember the number of operators that could access the machine at the same time but it was more than adequate for what the office needed.
IBM System 36
In 1988 the office once again lost its position in the market place and needed to up-grade to a computer that would help us retain market share. Once again we went to IBM for the solution and decided to purchase the Application System 400 or AS/400 Model B30. This is the first system that could accommodate the networking of Personal Computers. I found myself climbing the learning curve to keep up with the tools in the operating system. The AS/400 came with a package called IBM Office Vision. When I look back on that soft ware, I remember Office Vision contained calendaring, word processing, data base management and e-mail. All these things are contained in Microsoft Office. The seeds of learning at Clear Lake High School again came to light. Microsoft Word made me remember the lessons in sentence structure taught by Miss Clark in 1954. Every time I tried to write something, the red squiggly line would appear under a prepositional phrase or misspelled word. Office Vision was an excellent tool for keeping tract of appointments and airline travel. I remember a time when I was in Louisville, Kentucky late at night and my Office Vision calendar said I should go to the Holiday Inn. I looked up Holiday Inn in the yellow pages and found there were 10 of them. On the 8th call to a Holiday Inn, I found one that had a reservation for Ron Gerdes. I think it would be safe to say that most of the readers of this blog have a personal computer that has more power than any one of the AS/400 models shown below.
My first Personal Computer for my home was purchased in 1983. It was a Compaq Portable dual floppy. I remember the advertising for it. A guy placed one on top of his car and forgot it was there. It was bouncing down the road after him and he picked it up, placed some duct tape around it and went on his way. My experience was that it was not very portable. I would not fit under the seat in front of me on an airplane and was very difficult to place in the over head bins. I remember many times storing it in the closet in the front of a Boeing 727. You would place the program disk (5 ¼ Floppy) on the left drive and the data you created on the right side. I still have that old computer and its software. The price for the machine on E-Bay is still increasing. It has become a collector's item. I learned to use PFS First Choice for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets. The internet was still in its infancy but E-Mail was becoming very popular. I had some experience with spreadsheets with Visi Calc but became very familiar with Lotus 1-2-3. I did business planning on Lotus and found it fun to do "what ifs" on financial projections.
The excellent education from CLHS and Miss Irma Goldberg's Model Office program was helpful. Miss Goldberg did an excellent job of teaching us how to read and understand financial statements. I would like to hear from CLHS graduates that have taken classes from both Miss Goldberg and Mr. Rommel at Mason City Junior College. I think we would have some parallels of positive experiences.
The next computer I purchased was a Compaq Contura Lap Top in 1994. It had an internal hard drive but not much for storage. The internet was starting to become very popular and was not crowded like today. I can remember only two of the many search engines, Web Crawler, Excite, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. My first internet provider was Prodigy. Prodigy had some great chat rooms in those days. I wish I could find some of those chat room friends. I learned to use Microsoft Office word processing on the Contura. I was writing proposals in response to RFP's and in many cases the proposals were the same. I used the search and replace program to change each proposal and make it individualistic. I also learned how to use Microsoft Word's Mail Merge. I was able to send many personal business letters out in one day using mail merge.
I purchased a Compaq Pentium Tower computer in 1997. It had a tape drive and 8 Giga Bytes of memory. I purchased over $1,000 of software for that computer and placed a lot of pressure on it. I used it from 8:00 AM to 1:00 AM almost every day. I was a consultant for Robert Half Consulting and performed spreadsheet analysis at night when I returned home. I had three assignments from Robert Half, one of them was to be for three months. That assignment was at CHS (Cenex Harvest States) it did not last three months; it lasted 1 ½ years. I took a full time position with CHS in 2004 as a credit manager in the energy division. Cenex has a policy of getting rid of any computer that is 3 years old and offers them for sale to employees at $150.00 each. I purchased the computer I am writing on in 2004 and if was purchased new by Cenex in 2001. It is old for a computer but it has never failed me. "It takes a licking and keeps on tickin." It has slowed down on me several times and I thought it was going to die. The last time, I purchased one of those external hard drives that added 550 Giga Bytes of memory. I also purchased a Pentium 4 lap top computer from CHS. I fell asleep in my recliner one night with the lap top on my lap and it fell on the floor. I still have not unloaded on the data on that.
My wife did not bring her computer from Bogotį. We were sharing this old HP Pentium 4 and found we both wanted the computer at the same time. I purchased a Toshiba Satellite with 150 Giga Bytes of hard drive and thought Eddy would use the HP. She decided the Satellite was better for her. I'm OK with that because I have the 17" monitor and Logitech speaker system.
It's fun for me to look back on all the computers I have used or owned in the past 42 years. However, there are people that purchased their first computer in the past year and can do things with it that I don't know how to do. I can still keep a set up books with the use of Sales Journals, Check Registers, Cash Receipts Journals and General Ledgers. Produce and interpret Financial Statements. All by hand without a computer and that is because I took business courses from Miss Irma Goldberg and Clear Lake High School.
