My Career as a Computer Pioneer

This article tells how I participated in the early days of computers as a computer pioneer. It was 1958 and I was 35 years old. I had had my job as an Administrative Clerk at General Electric in Schenectady, New York for eleven years. I received a notice one day that my job was to be taken over by another employee of the company who had more service than I did. I had to find another job within General Electric.

At the General Electric Employment Office I was asked if I knew how to program a computer. I responded yes because I had been using a comptometer in my work (see picture) and believed that this machine qualified as being called a computer. Actually, I had never heard of computers and did not even know they existed. My interviewer displayed some surprise that I claimed computer knowledge but did not challenge what I had said. He assigned me to a new job as a computer programmer in a military unit..

I went into a state of panic when I learned what was expected of me in my new job. My new supervisor, Richard Cantrell, had no idea that I knew nothing about computers and I was about to confess when he stated that he was going to be out of town for a week. He assigned a project for me to work on and left. This gave me a week to learn a few things about computers and I spent the time wisely. When he returned and asked about the project, I informed him that I was loading the A and Q registers with binary bits and shifting them left and right. "Sounds like you're on top of things," he said. "Carry on!"

Mr. Cantrell soon hired more people; some gifted in math, others in physics. When on board, they shared with me what I needed to know in their specialties and I taught them how to move bits around in the A and Q registers. Somehow, the alliance worked and, we, working as a team, successfully completed the project. With more assignments coming down the pike, I gradually learned how to program a computer.

Time moved quickly forward to 1964 and I felt a desire to teach Fortran, a scientific programming language. I had never done this before and feared I might collapse in an attempt. As a backup plan, I wrote out my lessons and handed them out to students. Surprisingly, my classes went well and one student suggested I send the lessons to Prentice-Hall as a candidate to be published. I did and the material was accepted. My first book was published in 1967. This was not because it was great but because there was very little competition in computer literature. The publisher wanted more books so I began writing furiously and had several more books published in computer languages, math, flow charting, and even keypunching. The books were used in colleges and were translated into various languages. I had stopped programming and was now teaching full time at General Electric and in the evenings at local colleges and junior colleges.

My supervisor suggested I complete my college education and I did. I earned my Bachelor's Degree at The College of Saint Rose in 1973 by taking classes in the evening. The nuns, who had been my teachers, wanted to learn about computers and some of my evening classes were at this school.

I retired from General Electric in 1984 and took a job at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) teaching computers to students, faculty, and staff. Courses now included classes in personal computers. My work at this school ended ten years later and so did my teaching activities which had spanned thirty years.. I had helped thousands of people get started with computers. I had been a computer pioneer and had not even known it.