Shades of the Past

I have been programming computers since 1977. It all started in high school - the Cincinnati Public Schools had a mainframe computer for whatever reason, but one of the nice things about it was that they would let a small number of students use it during lunch break. It was a 300 baud (slower than frozen molasses) modem and a teletype "display." 

We primarily played a very, VERY rudimentary computer game based very, VERY loosely on Star Trek. This is what it looked like, albeit printed on paper and egregiously slow. It was a tremendous waste of paper in retrospect... but it was absolutely intriguing. 

I eventually got bored with the game, but I was fascinated with coding. It was BASIC back then, but that was a huge leap from machine or assembly programming.

Machine language is the binary code computers understand and execute directly, while assembly language is a human-readable machine language representation. One of the key differences between the two languages is their level of abstraction.

They both sucked. BASIC was the next step up. It was far more accessible and learnable.

Then along came the Radio Shack TRS-80.

Wikipedia: The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 [microprocessor]. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.

It cost me about $600 back then. That's about $3,000 in today's dollars. So now you're starting to wonder where a 16 year old got that kind of scratch at such a young age, right? My secret was a will to work for money. That statement probably made you wonder where that money came from.

Remember this? “They Make Money The Old-Fashioned Way, They Earn It.” - John Houseman.

So did I. When I was in the 5th grade, school lunch cost a princely 35¢. Very early in the school year we were offered the opportunity to work in the lunchroom in exchange for free lunch. Even back then there was no such thing as a free lunch - the cost to me was leaving the pre-lunch class 15 minutes early and getting to the post-prandial 15 minutes late. Not much of burden, that. The opposite, in fact.

On the plus side, my mom decided that she would start a little in-house bank account and contribute $1.75 per week (five 35¢ lunches) - it doesn't sound like much now, but as a five year old it was like being Scrooge McDuck.

I never spent a dime of it.

As I got older, I tried some of the more common jobs such as delivering the local "free" newspaper (quit that when I was flattened by a very growling German Shephard, a breed that I still dislike to this very day), but my first real job was when I was in Jr. High School. I got a job working for an independent pharmacy - I worked the cash register and made local deliveries. I wasn't old enough to drive yet, so I could only work in the nearby area. Which, to be fair, was a sh!thole. I was accosted a number of times while delivering. Once I was old enough to drive, I learned that I had had a pretty good gig. 

The car was a total piece of crap beat-up, ragged-out, Chevy Nova. It was no accident that the word "Nova" means "Does not go" in Spanish. The tires were bare, having apparently been manufactured in 1929. I ended up with a flat tire. No problem, right? Surely I knew how to change a tire by then right?

Yep. But... the jack was nothing but a puddle of rust. It wouldn't have mattered, though, because the spare was flat.

I got reamed when I got back to the pharmacy. I was mighty miffed at the time - I had gone back to the most recent delivery, thinking that maybe I could call for help. The only assistance I received was a forthright "Go the F*CK away!!" 

I was stuck. We didn't have cell phones back then. So I drove the car back as-was. What was I supposed to do??

I took Phil out to the car and asked him what he would have done. To his credit, he was very apologetic.

I was done soon after anyway - high school was next. I found a new job. I got a job cooking pizza. I worked the legal limit for a minor: 30 hours a week. That left no time for extracurriculars, but it sure did fill up my bank account!

And that is how I ended up with a 30+ year career as a software developer. It was a lucrative field of work, but it came with a cost that I had not anticipated. If you own a pickup truck, it is quite likely that you are asked to move, carry, haul any number of things for friends, neighbors, and the guy standing behind you at the Walmart checkout.

It's the same with computers. 

You can probably imagine the demands on a pickup-owner/computer-knowledgeable kind of guy.

These days the computer stuff is pretty much limited to family. I don't mind it at all, but the problem is that I have been retired 6-7 years ago and I am starting to forget all of that stuff.

Yesterday I drove out to Dad's place to try to improve the quality-of-PC-life for myself. He has difficulty getting decent internet service out there in the country. His house is pretty far away from the road, the wiring required to get a wired connection is prohibitively costly, satellite was an option, but expensive and flaky, and the wiring in the house is also suspect. The best thing I could come up with was a mobile hot spot. 

That solution was kludgy - the Hot Spot was a Verizon tablet. It worked, but it was complicated. He was also running out of his monthly fast internet right around the 3rd week of the month. We went back to Verizon and got his data plan upgraded and also got a much better hot spot.

That problem more or less fixed, I headed to the shop to do some work on the car. Unfortunately, there wasn't much I could help with. Grant has (thankfully) started working on the car without me being there. He's still working on the wiring, a job that has turned out to be far more effort than expected. As with nearly all of the build, the manual is pretty much useless. 

Oddly enough, that is nowhere near the top beef I have with the F5. Sloppy packing, some parts missing, others duplicated two or three times (which actually came in handy when I clumsily mis-drilled the tunnel cover) - it is nowhere near the quality experience I had/have with Vans Aircraft.

I was spoiled before we even started.

Once the tunnel cover situation was rectified, Grant got back to wiring. The harness is more or less installed and ready to be hooked up to a dozen or so lights, switches, etc. Most everything has a ground wire...

So, not a whole lot of progress on the car, but still time well spent.

Work time for this step:  3 hours.

Unproductive time: None. Utilizing flagging skills is good. 

Frustration Level: 1/10 for car. 

Total time of build: 140 hours.