Hello World

My blog is alive. It is interesting to think back to the 70′s when my first program generated those two words. It was amazing… Of course punch cards were not…. they were useful as scratch paper, but as a way to enter data…. what a mess. And then the horrors, if you were to drop the tray. Eg, it was incredibly easy to create spagetti code.

The good thing however, is that a batch job would take hours, so one spent a lot of time to get it right before even key punching the cards. I guess the discipline of that era was a good thing. Today, if my compile takes 10 seconds, I tend to get impatient. I also tend to be sloppy in coding, I try things, I type fast, sometimes faster than I think.

When I finally moved up to the Apple II+ with integer Basic it was like leaving the dark ages. Of course I did miss the floating point operations that the mainframe had, but this machine was cool. One could even carry it.

Of course then the ideas began to fly. So, being the industrious youngster, I thought it would be slick to do something unusual with the computer. So I attached a disected frog leg to the joystick port…… I could create impulses with the digital outputs, and then capture the corresponding movement of the leg and even graph it.

I said hello to a new world that day.