Almost 20 years have passed since I retired from AT&T after spending 33 years working in NC, NY, CO, overseas and DC. During those years I considered myself a lucky guy because I loved my job and could hardly wait to get to the office. I wonder how many people feel that way today.

After graduating from Bliss Electrical Institute I joined AT&T's Western Electric's Radio Works in NC in 1951. Three years later I was transferred to New York City as a planning engineer with Western Electric that had a prime contract to implement a computerized air-defense system called the SAGE system. From then on my career remained in communications and computers and during this time I attended college at night to further my education. Those were pioneering days and we were on the leading edge working with real-time computers and digital communications. But it wasn't until 1963 that I got hands-on experience with a computer.

I was transferred from New York City to the parent company AT&T in Colorado Springs to work with the Air Force’s Air Defense Command. Upon arriving I was sent to the Bell System’s Data Engineering School in Cooperstown NY for 3 months and it was there that I wrote my first computer program on punched paper tape using a Frieden Flexiwriter connected to a Royal McBee computer. I don’t even recall what the program was supposed to do but I became hooked on computers.

I really became immersed in computers in 1970 after being transferred to AT&T’s Government Communications office in Washington DC. While there I attended a System Design course for two months at the University of Pennsylvania where we used Fortran programming language. Upon completing the course I returned to work very excited over what I had learned and began teaching Fortran to other engineers so they could use a computer and system design tools. We ordered more Model 33 Teletype terminals to dial into the GE time-shared computer and our office became computerized. I even began carrying home a portable acoustic-coupled terminal to dial into GE to prepare programs for work. Those were fun days.

I should mention that before microcomputers and mini-computers existed there were just 'computers,' large monstrous machines and VERY expensive. Only large corporations used them since they cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. To offset their costs some companies leased time on their computer during normally idle times. This was called 'time-sharing' and access was usually via phone lines. AT&T had a time-shared IBM computer but I preferred using the more powerful and friendly GE Mark IV system.

In 1973, after studying and taking night courses, I became a certified computer professional by the Institute for Certified Computer Professionals (ICCP). By this time I had created considerable engineering software, mostly involving data network design. One program that performed network-mapping became a Bell System standard program used by the operating companies.

Finally I owned my own computer called a KIM. It really wasn’t much of a computer because it only had 2K bytes of RAM and an LED display with a keypad to enter hexadecimal commands. It came with a course I took on Microprocessors. Hexadecimal programming was tough since it was just a step above programming with ones and zeros.

In 1981 I went big time and purchased an APPLE II+ computer with 65K of RAM, 8” monitor, 2 disk drives and an EPSON dot-matrix printer, all for just under $3000. The real plus was that it came with a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc that I used to answer ‘what if’ engineering questions at work. Finally I took my Apple computer to work to demonstrate its power and managed to convince our staff to order microprocessors for the office. For my suggestion I received a monetary award plus a wonderful weekend with my wife at a luxurious resort in the mountains.

I retired in 1984 following the Bell System breakup. Since then I’ve had several computers, each with more than twice the power of the last and about half the cost. It’s hard to believe that 41 years have passed since I typed a program on punched tape and now I’m using a 2.0GHz laptop PC to write this article. It’s also mind boggling that I can now get information from anywhere on earth using the Internet and especially wonderful that e-mail keeps our separated family in close contact. I can’t even imagine what the future holds in computers and communications.