I could have been a billionaire!

With this post I am taking a new approach. I don’t plan on doing things chronologically, but instead based on what I want to be sure is remembered. And with that….

After high school I went to Santa Ana Community College (now Santa Ana College) with an intent to major in physics. This did not go well as my second semester I took Electrical Physics (now called Engineering Physics II) where I received a D for the semester, and I blame my study partner for that! After that I went in search of a new career and discovered Computer Science.

My first classes were in BASIC and FORTRAN. Fortran was done on a Burroughs B5500 mainframe, kept in it’s own air conditioned room. It was programmed using punch cards.

My BASIC programming class used an HP 2000 using what we called an old teletype machine for input. your programs were saved on a paper tape punch.

While I really enjoyed taking FORTRAN, BASIC, and ASSEMBLER programming classes, I positively abhorred my COBOL class. COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was a real pain. From my perspective, righting sentences to do a calculation was ridiculous. to add two numbers you literally wrote:

Add A to B store in C

it KILLED me. So I learned the language, aced the class tests and never ever wrote a program, which of course meant I ended up with a C in the class.

As for why I claim I could have been a billionaire, the story involves a game called Star Trek that we played on the HP computer. The game looked like this except instead of a screen you might have to use a teletype machine and have each screen printed out.

There were lots of students that spent lots of hours playing this game. Including me. Well one day after class in 1976 I was walking to my car with three of my computing friends and we were discussing the star trek game. During the discussion we dreamed up setting up a business where you would tie multiple terminals (or computers today) into a single large environment where people could play in a single star trek universe to hunt klingons alone or in groups. Boy if we had only known then that 13 years later the internet would go public we could have had the first MMORPG in the world. We would have been RICH!!!!