the stampede of technological progress, part 2
This chapter of the Great Historic Epic of our Generation will be brief. While technology was stampeding away during the late seventies, I had relatively little contact with it. Due to forces beyond my control, I found myself attending high school in Wayne, Nebraska. I remember this as more the era of the calculator rather than the computer. I think my high school had some computers, but they were used in the business classes, and I didn’t take any business classes. During this period I bought a programmable calculator, a big wow at the time. It had functions for trigonometry and logarithms plus a fifty step program memory.
One of my high school classes took a field trip to the big mainframe at the local college. There I had my first contact with computer proto-graphics. I got to type my name onto a punch card, which was fed into the computer. It spat out GARTH in giant letters, with each of the giant letters composed of carefully arranged small versions of the same letter, so the great big G was composed af a bunch of little Gs. As crude and primitive as that sounds, it was impressive, way-cool stuff at the time.
Tags: stampede