My Life with Computers – Part 1

© 2013–15, 2018, 2019, 2025 Rex Jaeschke. All rights reserved.

I started working full-time with computers in January 1976, which in computer years is a very long time ago! (I sometimes joke that when I started, we only had zeros; ones came later!) However, that wasn’t my first career; from 1970–1975, I worked in chemistry (complete with white lab coat and nerdy pocket protector). So, at the time of publication of this essay, I’ve been in the workforce for 55+ years, with (hopefully) at least a few more years to come.

During my first 20 years in Information Technology (IT), I was primarily involved in designing applications, writing programs in various computer languages to implement those applications, and in writing user and programmer documentation. Along the way, I spent several years with an international software vendor in a technical support management role, and helped launch a new product. Overlapping those roles, I wrote a great deal for publication (starting a magazine and journal along the way), and developed and taught programming language seminars. I also committed in a big way to working with US and international groups in writing and maintaining formal specifications for various IT topics, mostly computer programming languages.

In this series, I’ll look back at my life as it relates to computers, and how they have played, and continue to play, a major role. However, lest you not be of the computer faith, I’ll keep things light with respect to the nerdy technical details.

By the way, from quite early in my life I showed signs of being a budding entrepreneur. I was able to recognize and take advantage of opportunities to do different and interesting things, and later I learned how to create opportunities and to avoid competition with regards to getting ahead, as you will read. [See my essays from 2011, “Talk is Cheap. Write it Down,” and its successor, “Planning for Success.”]

Technology in the Good Old Days

Before I get started on my actual exposure to computers, it’s worth spending a little time looking at the environment in which I grew up, especially regarding technology (or lack thereof):

• I was born in December of 1953, in rural South Australia (SA), in a semi-desert dryland farming and irrigated fruit-growing region, three hours from the state capital.

• From my earliest memories (from around age 5), I lived in a rented farmhouse six miles from a town of 4,000-odd people. The house had no electricity; no running hot water; an outhouse (outdoor toilet over a hole in the ground); a wall-mounted, battery-powered phone on which one cranked a handle to summon an operator; and a kerosene-powered refrigerator (with a small freezer for ice trays).

• We had an AM valve (and later, a transistor) radio with a handful of channels.

• We had a battery-powered record player.

• I very rarely went to the drive-in or movie theater.

• We did not own a camera.

• In 1961, we got a 32-volt DC power generating plant, which supported electric lighting, but no appliances. We also got a flush toilet system (but it was still outside the house).

• Around 1964, (black and white) TV reception arrived being transmitted 150 miles from the state capital. [As we had no mains electricity, we had to run the generating plant to watch TV.] The picture was not too clear.

• In 1966, we moved to a house with mains electricity, so we could have electric appliances (such as a fridge, freezer, hot water system, and stove) and power tools.

• The 8-track tape format was not popular in Australia. I was first exposed to cassette tape in the early 1970’s.

• I attended high school from 1965–1969:

  • There was no TV and no video, or even audio, systems to assist with teaching.

  • Photocopying machines, as we know them today, did not exist; duplication was done with a hand-cranked Fordigraph machine.

  • Regarding computers, I learned that there was a technical high school in the state capital, which had an IBM computer capable of running programs written in the RPG language. One could send by mail a program written on coding sheets, the school would run it and then mail back the results. Not having any staff members conversant with, or even interested in, computers, that option was not available to me.

• FM radio became mainstream in the mid 70’s.

So, what did I do without all those hand-held devices that people nowadays “absolutely must have?” I had chores (including milking cows by hand and feeding and tending to farm animals); hobbies; I read; I played outdoors, climbed trees, and built tree houses; and I played sport, sport, and more sport!

[For more details about those good old days, see my essays from 2021, My Formative Years – Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]

My Big Epiphany

In March of 1974, I started my fifth year as a part-time, evening student at the South Australian Institute of Technology (SAIT), taking two classes at the main campus, in downtown Adelaide, the state capital. My previous classes had each been year-long and were related in some way to chemistry and associated lab work. However, that year, an “Introduction to Computer Programming” class, Programming 1P, was scheduled for about 16 weeks. The idea was that by then, minicomputers were becoming affordable, and some science labs were buying them so their staff could write programs for their needs without having to wait on central data-center staff to get involved. (Unfortunately, my employer at that time, the SA Department of Chemistry, was not one of those labs.)

That class changed my life in a very profound way. About 10 minutes into the first lecture, I knew my purpose on earth was to program computers. Looking back now, that really wasn’t so surprising, as I’d always liked puzzles, card and board games involving pattern recognition, and logic. [Deep down I’m a Vulcan!] However, up until that time, I had not had the opportunity to use those interests in any way other than as a recreational activity.

We learned to program in BASIC-PLUS, a very powerful, and heavily extended, version of BASIC for Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11 computers. I also bought reels of 10-track, random-access, magnetic tape on which to store my programs and data. We used interactive video terminals, and teleprinters that printed on fan-folded paper and that also punched and read paper tapes. I quickly developed a rapport with the American lecturer (who programmed the same computer for the business office of the school), and he allowed me access to the computer room to mount and use my magnetic tapes. [More than 20 years later, on a trip back to SA, I visited him, and he was thrilled to learn how much of an influence on my life his class had been.]

As the Chemistry Dept. was only a 10-minute walk away, for many days of the term in which I took that class, I was in the computer lab at 6 am when it opened, until I went to work three hours later. Then some nights after work, I went back to the lab until it closed at midnight. I simply could not get enough of it; for the first time in my life, at age 20, I was passionate about something!

It wasn’t until several years later, when I started working in batch mode on a mainframe computer, that I realized how my initial programming experience was quite unusual in that it was completely interactive. (The computer’s operating system was RSTS/E [resource-sharing time-sharing].) Instead of writing programs on coding sheets and getting someone to transfer them to punched cards, and then waiting hours (or even overnight) to get printed output, or worse, a list of errors that prohibited the program from executing properly or at all, I could enter code interactively, and test the program as I developed it. That ability to test and refine in real-time made for a very stimulating learning environment!

For the record, the university catalog for Programming 1P indicated that the class would cover the following: “The components of a computer; simple logical operations; simple flowcharts and algorithms; basic programming, compiled versus machine languages; survey of storage devices; addressing, input/output devices; operating systems; the computer as a general symbol processor; uses and misuses of computers in science and research.” No surprise, I received an A.

By the way, the computer’s main storage devices were several (physically rather large) 5 megabyte (MB) removable-disk cartridges. [In contrast, as I write this essay, I’m backing it up to a USB stick that holds 32 gigabytes (GB), a capacity that is 6,400-times larger, and I regular use 2 terabyte (TB) hard drives, which are 400,000-times larger. And just last month, I bought a 1TB memory stick for only US$140, and three 5TB external disks for US$120 each!]

During that class, the instructor arranged a field trip to the neighboring Adelaide University campus. There in the psychology department, a group of students was conducting experiments with Norwegian Hooded rats regarding their learning ability. A rat was put into a maze, which it had to navigate to get to a feeder. Initially, it simply had to press a bar to get a food pellet. Then it had to press it a certain number of times, and then not press it too often, and then the path to a reward got more complicated. The data was collected, stored, and processed on a PDP-11 computer, which was affectionally known as RATS-11!

Planning My Escape from Chemistry

When my programming class ended, it was awfully hard to get back to being interested in Chemistry, and frankly, I never really did! My department didn’t have any word processing facility; all reports were handwritten, and then were typed, which of course I found to be very frustrating. Afterall, I had drunk at the well of interactive computing, and I knew what was possible! [As far as computational hardware went, my particular lab had just taken delivery of a new gas-liquid chromatography (GLC) unit with built-in integration of curves, which calculated the area under a plotted curve showing retention times and printed the result on the plotted chart. This device freed up 3–4 hours each day for scientists who had previously done that calculation using a cylindrical slide rule, pen, and paper!]

As a student at SAIT, after my programming class ended, I was allowed to keep my computer account, and I spent many hours in the computer lab. I also got permission to buy the manuals for the operating system and BASIC-PLUS language, so I could learn as much as I could.

As someone who was moving along in the field of Chemistry, how could I move over to that of IT without starting at the very bottom, as a data-entry operator, for example? Working for a state government agency, I had access to all its “Public Service Administration” resources, and I set up an interview. Their test results showed that I certainly had an aptitude for computer programming, but, at that time, they had no path for me to take in that direction. However, the interviewer was sympathetic to my situation and “he put that information in my file.” Some 15 months later, a GREAT opportunity arose, and that interviewer remembered me; YES!

In 1975, the SA State Government had an acute shortage of computer programmers, so it arranged for SAIT to develop and teach a 3‑month training program to be run in the (southern) summer—January through March of 1976—when the campus was largely empty. They announced an opportunity for state civil servants to take an aptitude test to see if they would qualify for selection to this program. In my case, I had already taken the test. As for the other 500 applicants, they had to cram into a very large hall and compete with each other and the clock. I was one of the “25 Chosen Ones!”

Changing Careers

In January 1976, I reported to the (relatively new) SAIT campus known as The Levels, as a full-time student—on full pay and benefits—primarily to learn systems analysis and the COBOL programming language on a Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframe. Along the way, I was also introduced to the FORTRAN programming language. I was just 22 years old, and I got married the third weekend into the training program. [My honeymoon would wait for three more years, when my wife and I spent five weeks traveling through Asia and Europe, on our way to live in the US, where I would manage and program a PDP-11 computer running RSTS/E. Coincidence? I think not—the planets simply were aligned!]

Each student was assigned to a state government department, which for me was Highways. My contact there happened to be a former high school teacher who just loved teaching. And in that respect, he did a great job in helping me program in the real world. He also came to visit me on campus on a regular basis to see how things were going, and to bring stationery such as pens, paper, and coding pads. (After all, we were programming in batch mode, using punched cards; sigh!)

The Highways and Byways of South Australia

After the training course ended, we went to our respective departments for six months of on-the-job training, of which, at the completion, I became a Computer Systems Officer Grade I (CSO 1), with CSO 4 being the highest level in the Highways Department. [For those of us—like me—already on a salary and benefits package more valuable than that, we kept our old pay grade and length-of-service credit.]

At the beginning of April 1976, I reported to work at the Highways Department of South Australia, where I worked until the middle of 1979. I was assigned a desk alongside three other trainees, and we wrote COBOL programs according to other people’s specifications, and we learned to design small programs using flow charts. The business applications were of the classic validation, update, and report type.

The headquarters building was a sprawling 7-story building that when viewed from above was in the shape of the letter H. (After all, we were the Highways Department!) It must have housed close to 2,000 employees. My section took up one whole wing on the first floor (where floors in Australian buildings begin at G for ground, with 1 being on the second level). Together, we developed and maintained almost all the software for the department.

One very civilized aspect of life in a British Commonwealth government department was the idea of tea breaks. Each day at mid-morning and mid-afternoon work stopped, a tea lady arrived with her cart loaded with large stainless-steel urns of tea and coffee, and staff socializing began. The afternoon service also included biscuits (US: cookies), as God intended! [In the 45+ years I’ve lived in the US, I have introduced the notion of afternoon tea to quite a few people. However, my version involves the serving of smoked salmon and/or camembert cheese on crackers.]

Computing at public facilities in Australia —think state and federal agencies, universities, and research facilities—had gone through a number of cycles. At one time they had used systems from the British company ICL. During my time there, they were heavily into supercomputers from Control Data Corporation (CDC). [Later, they would move to clusters of DEC VAXs.] In the case of the SA Government, the systems were located at a central facility, which was manned 24x7. Highspeed links connected them to departments around the capital. We had an operator who ran our local punched-card reader and printer. For each task, she read-in a card deck containing a program and (optionally) data, and that was transmitted to the central facility, where the program was run, and the output transmitted back for printing. We also had a few interactive terminals, but they were little used, as the main operation was in batch mode.

A group of keypunch operators punched cards for the programs we wrote and the data that was supplied from the field, typically on forms. First, one operator punched the cards, then a second operator typed in the same information, which was verified against the holes previously punched. This was a time-consuming and repetitious task, not to mention a noisy one! [By the way, the small piece of card punched out for each character is known as a chad. The 2000 US Presidential election featured a lot of “hanging chads” on ballot punched cards; that is, chads that were not clearly formed, and whose validity was disputed, all the way to the US Supreme Court.] Around 1978, the keypunch machines were replaced by a dedicated key-to-disk system. While the operators still typed in and verified the programs and data, it was all done electronically; there were no longer any physical cards, and a lot less noise.

One member of my immediate group was lacking interpersonal skills, and whenever he found more than a few punching errors in his card decks, he would verbally abuse the keypunch operator responsible. Soon after, the error rate on his card decks mysteriously increased—can you say “payback?”—and he had to submit his requests under someone else’s name to avoid “extra” errors. (As he learned the hard way, and as many of his colleagues already knew, the effectiveness of an organization can be made or broken based on how the administrative and support staff are treated.)

Now it turned out that I still had one final, year-long chemistry class to complete to graduate academically from my previous world. And while I started that class, my heart just wasn’t in it, and I withdrew mid-year. I have to say that I’ve never regretted doing so for one instant! However, during that time at SAIT, I did get a bit of exposure to a PDP-11 that monitored and controlled some science lab experiments, and that interested me greatly, and something I would get to do in an engineering environment years later in the US. I also spent my only time with an analog computer, with which my one experiment produced 1.999 as the square root of 4, which was close enough for government work!

Along the way, I joined the Australian Computer Society and became active in the SA chapter.

Changing My Education Focus

After nearly seven years studying Chemistry (and related math and physics topics), I started a computing-science degree course at SAIT, as a half-time student with paid time off from work to attend classes, which were mostly held during the workday. However, given the specialization of university education in SA, none of the credits I'd earned from all my years in Chemistry transferred; I was starting from scratch! [In that respect, I very much prefer the US’s 4-year liberal-arts university model.]

The aim of the course was as follows: “To provide the basis for a professional career in Computing and Data Processing. Students may specialize in one of three areas: management and commercial applications of computers in private or government administration; scientific, industrial and engineering applications of computers; management applications of computers with a supporting sequence in political aspects of government administration.” I chose the first option. [By then, I'd had enough of mathematics and physics, and lab science, in general.]

By the time I left Australia in mid-1979, I'd completed one full-time year of that 3-year program, and I never did finish an undergraduate degree. Hey, I was a guy in a hurry. [Years later, it occurred to me that if Bill Gates could succeed in IT as a college drop-out, perhaps I could too. I did, but I’m trailing him by more than a few billion dollars!]

In the years leading up to that time, I had accumulated an extensive reference library, and one fine day, when I had way too much free time on my hands, I decided to catalog it using an abridged version of the Dewey Decimal System, and Cutter-Sanborn author classification system. Of course, now that I was in the world of IT, I would have to computerize that catalog. So, while on campus for my ComSci classes, I got cards punched with all the title/author data that I’d coded, and I wrote a COBOL program to print KWIC (key word in context) and KWOC (key word out of context) reports. (Did I mention I was a library nerd?)

Opportunity Knocks

My IT section members at the Highways Department sat at open-space desks, with each project area separated by mid-height, temporary walls. There were only two offices with permanent, floor-to-ceiling walls, and doors, and our CSO 4 “commanding officer” occupied one of them. The other was home to a systems engineer, who was not “one of us;” he was a highway engineer. He often went out into the field and/or had meetings in other parts of the building, but when he was in residence, he joined us at break times, which is how I got to know him.

Being interested in learning about, and doing, new things, I asked him about his work, and as it happened, he was involved with a project that interested me, and he could do with some IT help. It had to do with the recording and processing of “concrete compression” results. Every time a contractor on a highway construction jobsite delivered a truckload of concrete, a sample was taken from which a 9-inch cylinder-shape was formed, along with details filled out on a form that identified that load. Three days later, the sample was crushed, with a series of measurements being recorded on that form. This was part of a quality-control process, and, in the extreme case, if certain tests failed, the contractor had to pay to have all the concrete from that batch dug up and removed, so they had some serious incentive to “get it right the first time!”

After some meetings with the CSO 4, with the engineer’s whole-hearted support, I was seconded to him to redesign the data-collection form, and to write a new program (in COBOL) to process the data collected from forms filled out with each test’s results. And, to add some icing to the cake, I moved into the engineer’s spacious private office and worked from there.

My second project there involved a program called HEC, designed by the Hydrologic Engineering Center within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to Wikipedia, HEC “is designed to simulate the precipitation-runoff processes of dendritic drainage basins. It is designed to be applicable in a wide range of geographic areas for solving the widest possible range of problems. This includes large river basin water supply and flood hydrology, and small urban or natural watershed runoff.” My department’s interest in this was to simulate 1-in-50- and 1-in-100-year storms, for example, to study the impact on catchment areas abutting areas under investigation for highway and support facility construction and maintenance. Basically, the aim was to make sure that construction is strong enough to withstand the worst weather conditions likely, but not unnecessarily strong, as that costs more money! For this project, I developed my programming skills in FORTRAN.

Opportunity Knocks, Again, Big-Time!

My work with systems engineering and my responsibilities with the staff social club got me “out and about” around the department, and I learned of a small group “hidden away” on the floor above me. The Digital Mapping group had its very own DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (running the RSX-11M operating system), and the folks there were happy to have me join them. (A much smaller, second PDP-11 system was dedicated to displaying and editing via a graphics display.) They had an air-conditioned computer room with raised floor under which all the power and data cables ran.

There, I designed and implemented a system (in FORTRAN) to digitize from topographic maps all the state-owned or maintained roads and their adjunct facilities like bridges, rail crossings, and quarries. That got me into real-time data acquisition. I then tied that system to a cadastral system of land use and valuation information allowing planning engineers to figure out where to run new highways through neighborhoods. That project involved a lot of plotting and graphics. Others in my group worked on a system that gathered traffic statistics by punching holes in paper tape when cars ran over those rubber hoses you see stretched across a highway, and they were on the fringes of the first work in SA on computerized traffic system controls.

As well as designing and writing programs, I helped the systems programmer maintain the RSX-11M system. That got me exposed to the MACRO-11 assembly language. I got plenty of hands-on experience with two kinds of magnetic tapes, fan-folded paper tape, and booting the computer starting from scratch. We ran the whole operation on four 5 MB removable-cartridge disk drives. Later, we took delivery of a large cabinet containing an 88 MB disk drive with removable disk pack, which was a huge amount of storage at that time.

We produced graphical output on a very large, and very high speed, flatbed plotter made by Xynetics. It truly was a wonder to watch it work! It was driven by a dedicated Hewlett-Packard minicomputer whose only peripherals were a teletype console with paper tape reader and punch, a magnetic tape drive, and the plotter. We created tapes on the PDP-11 and took them next door to plot the files they contained.

By the way, back then, CDC computers did not support lowercase letters; everything was done in uppercase, so when I moved to Digital Mapping, whose PDP-11 supported both upper- and lower case, on both terminals and the printer, I produced a lot of online documentation using an in-house text-processing program.

As a private project, I got all the data from my personal library catalog transferred from SAIT via magnetic tape, and I wrote a new reporting program for it in FORTRAN. I was done with punched cards!

Now the SA state government was a classic British Commonwealth operation; you waited for someone to retire or die to get ahead. And I was a young man in a hurry! Once again, it was time to move on.

Off to the US

Early in 1978, I noticed an advertisement in the Pacific Computer Weekly trade paper, which, oddly enough, was published every two weeks! It invited people in Australia and New Zealand with solid computer programming skills to consider taking a job in another country. [At that time, there were many high-paying jobs for people with experience on IBM mainframe computers in places like Iran (before the Shah fell) and Saudi Arabia. However, I had no such experience. My specialty was with PDP-11 minicomputers and, fortunately, that skill was in high demand in other places.] By then, I had been in the field more than two years, I had obtained a wide range of experiences, and I was interested. So, I wrote a letter to the US-based recruiter who'd placed the ad, outlining my skills and requesting information.

He responded enthusiastically. However, at the time, I was in the middle of a major renovation of the house my wife and I had bought when we were first married, and I still had a lot of work to do. As such, I indicated my interest but said it would take considerable time before I would be ready. Over the next year, the house renovations were completed, and we put it on the market. After we sold the house and our cars, we put some things in storage and got rid of the rest. Then we lived with friends for some weeks, and I gave a month's notice to quit my job at the Highways Department.

A significant thing to note is that my lack of an undergraduate degree of any kind—let alone Computer Science—was not seen as an impediment. After all, the US had a long history of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurial people with a “can do” attitude, and that description surely fit me.

[For details of my 5-week trip from Adelaide to Chicago, see my 2019 essay, “Travel – From Adelaide to Washington DC.”]

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I grace the US with my presence!