Where am I, how did I get here, why am I here?

It is truly amazing, the changes in the world that have gotten me to this place with these people! I was born in 1943, during the second World War. A time that to many of you was a short section of your history books (maybe only a paragraph!). But to me it was an important part of my upbringing. My father was in the Army Air Corps, later renamed the Army Air Force, and even later to the United States Air Force.

But more to the point, there were NO computers, NO television, No cell phones, NO PDAs, not everyone had a phone in their house, NO seatbelts, and women in the general workplace were just starting to occur (Rosie the Riveter!).

The first electronic computer was created in the mid 40s. When I went to high school and junior college, there were still no computers. After 3 years in the army (1963-1966), businesses were just starting to use computers. In 1970, two years after I was married, I started a job at CNA in Chicago as a programming trainee. Since there were no degree programs yet, they accepted me on the basis of tests that were supposed to indicate the ability of a person to program computers. At that time, CNA had just taken delivery of a brand new, IBM 360 computer. It filled a major portion of a room, had about 128k (may even have been less!) of memory, no disk drives, no online terminals, and relied on tape, punched cards, and printers to get data in and out of the it! Punch cards for you youngsters, were pieces of light cardboard about 8 1/2 by 3 3/4 inches with rectangular holes punched in them that could be read by (are you ready for this?) a card reader!

By around 1975, the first personal computers were just coming into being. I was at CNA and some of the folks were trying to start a club to get and learn more about a computer called the Altair. It required in depth knowledge of octal (base 8) numbering, the use of binary equivalents, and to start it, you had to enter binary strings using switches on the front of the box! This was only a little more than 30 years ago!

By 1975, in the mainframe world (business computers), TSO (time sharing option) had come into being with line editors available and a little interactive processing available. CRTs were relatively new and ran very limited applications.

And guess what, there was still no generally accessible world wide web! By 1969, however, 4 computers had been linked together with a system called ARPANET, the beginning of the internet.

(to be continued, hopefully)