Computing for me began in New York City in the mid-'50s when I was transferred in as an engineer to work on the Air Force SAGE (Semi-automatic ground environment) system at Western Electric's Defense Projects. Computers were being born at the time and we became involved with the world's largest real-time computer that was to be installed across the nation to automate US air defense. The nation was at the height of the cold war and people were building bomb shelters. The project was highly classified and documents continually crossed my desk assessing the Russian bomber threat.

The SAGE computer was indeed huge. So big, in fact, that one could walk into it since it occupied a whole room. Next door, a second identical computer operated as a standby. Each computer had 50,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 250 tons. By comparison, some 10 million of such tubes are now placed on a single silicon chip. Today a PC has far more computing power than the SAGE computer had. But at the time, we were working on leading edge technology. I recall the day when I first saw magnetic core memory installed to replace rows of drum memory and how quiet it was compared to the noise of the whirring drums.

Not only were computers born in the '50s; we were connecting them to radar and missile sites using digital data circuits for the first time. Instead of using slow-speed teletypewriter circuits, SAGE radar sites fed the computers at 2600 bits-per-second using two circuits. Nowadays practically everybody with a PC connects to the Internet at just under 56,000 bits-per-second. In the '60s at AT&T we called 56K 'Wideband' and it was very expensive.

The first computer I ever programmed myself  was called a Royal McBee at the Bell System's Cooperstown Data Engineering school in 1963. I had to punch my program on paper tape on a Frieden Flexiwriter to feed into the computer. It seemed awfully complicated, especially since I couldn't type (and still can't).

The real boon in computer use by individuals came about when time-shared computer services became available. In the late '60s I became a user of General Electric's Mark (X) computer service and ended up writing well over 100 programs mostly on data network design, some of which became Bell System standards. I used Fortran and Basic programming languages.

In 1979 the first computer I owned came with a course taken on programming microprocessors. It was called a KIM and was nothing more than a breadboard computer with a hexadecimal keypad and LCD display. The memory was 2K of RAM. That's 2000 bytes compared to PCs today with 64 million bytes of RAM. I learned to write programs for my little KIM using hexadecimal, a small step up from writing programs in ones and zeros.  I longed for an assembler language to make programming easier.

Finally in 1981 I broke down and bought a real computer with all the bells and whistles. It was an Apple II+ with 64K of RAM, an 8" green monitor and a Epson matrix printer and cost $2557. What especially sold me on Apple was VISICALC, the first spreadsheet program ever developed. In no time at all I was bringing in answers to 'what if' questions raised by my boss and suddenly I was charged to teach all our engineers how to program a computer. Those days were so much fun I could hardly wait to get to work.