Post Basic
After another month of "Advanced" Basic where I learned about Bubble Sort and files, how to create, open, write to them, erase and close them I was feeling pretty good with myself. I was on my way to becoming Computer Savvy. The usual way to get more experienced was to write Inventory or Payroll programs and this was supposed to really get your hands dirty. The very popular Accounting program Peachtree was written in Basic and it looked really formidable so I decided I was going to do my own thing and write a program that was to give me a handle on the Numbers Game based on the Jai Alai Special LLave. Ten players sporting the numbers one through ten were going to play every night and the numbers of the top three finishers would determine who would win. Many people have gotten addicted to this game and reportedly a lot of money is to be won if one could just figure the right combinations.
I thought this would be a worthy project that would also have the added benefit that if I was able to make a program that could point me in the right direction of which numbers would be most likely to come out in the winning combination I would also be able to win some money. I had no idea how I was going to do this program but the prospect of a machine that could predict outcomes of number games was pretty exciting indeed.
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A love affair with smalltalk
Before the Internet was an integral part of daily life and the word
Website was still unheard of, I had my first-hand experience with Computer Programming using the Basic interpreter that came with the Apple II personal computer at the training school that I enrolled in. It was a one-month crash course that introduced the fundamentals of the computer and the Basic language itelf. I learned about Variables from my teacher who treated me like an unworthy acolyte while he laborioously explained the difference between a String Variable and a Numeric Variable as though they were the most wonderful nuggets of wisdom and he a High Priest who was full of it and overflowing with a generosity to share these secret doctrines. I especially noticed how he would display his knowledge and showcase his genius when it was a young female student he was tutoring. So involved would his explanations be and so confused his listener.
This was my first brush with the Black Art of Computer Programming which sounded to me like an esoteric, forbidden knowledge whose fruit could only be savored by select Cognoscenti. Who would not fail to be intimidated when confronted by Kilobytes of Floppy Disk space and dynamic Random Access Memories? Not to mention static RAMs and CPUs with blazing megahertz? Add to that mix the ever-mysterious database files which constantly faced cross-linking and corruption and you have the beginnings of TechnoPhobia. Which was not really a bad thing once you got over the fear of the jargon and deciphered the mumbo-jumbo to mean very specific terms. Then it would be your turn to play Tech Guru.
