BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012  12:05 a.m.

I do not have all the details on the history of the computer but I can tell you of my experiences over the years and the evolution of the computer. I can go back to the 1950s and talk about my father's experiences with the computer. In his day, numbers were important and to keep a large organization of jewellery stores going and provide suitable data required the most modern equipment. As Chief Accountant and Officer Manager he had a team of some 60 individuals processing data and reporting to him. He was the first to introduce a cash register to the main store and then to install the first computer in the head office. It consisted of a wall of tubes that flashed on and off on a regular basis as data was processed. By today's standards, it used technology that the radio industry was about to give up and needed tubes that you might find in the back of early television sets. Nevertheless, the system worked and it worked well. Data was punched on to cards and the cards were fed to a reader which produced a final report and save many accountants hours and hours of work to generate. My sister worked in the input department as a teenager one summer and that was her job. When the computer broke down, the only way to repair it was to bring in farm fruit basket after basket of new tubes and exchange them for the old ones that would be tested and recycled back at the shop. Archaic as the system war, it worked and did not need fancy equipment to be carried around hoping to find the error.

To give you a comparison of how the size of computers has changed, the entire space program was run by the Illiac 4 computer system which took up the equivalent of 4 city blocks to run it. Today that can be done on a couple of desktop computers. How times have changed. 

In 1972 I came to Toronto to work with Burroughs Business Machines. My initial job was to program computers. In those days, the mechanical machines were still being repaired but every attempt was being made to replace them with the Burroughs L2000 machine. Simply, it was a desk with a small computer in it which could be used with cards or paper tape much like the principle of the old ticker tape systems established at the turn of the century. The computer language was called Assembler and to this day is still the basic number system that runs your computer and every computer in the world because it used the numbers 0 to 9. Many platforms now sit on top of that basic system but they just make programming easier once you learn the language. When I learned how to program, it took 8 months until the next had a program came along for me to write in the Toronto Branch on Bay Street. It was a front desk registration system for the hotel up the street. I almost had to relearn how to program again but the final product was produced and it worked well. 

It was about this time that my brother JIm became an instructor at George Brown College teaching math having gained his PhD in Math from Queen's University in Kingston. For a period of seven years he was also director of computer services at George Brown. At home he programmed small screened Commodore Pet computers and learned all about languages. After a failed attempt at running a software wholesale business on the side, he continued on to build, sell and program computers in his spare time. He bought and read just about every computer book possible and to this day has a library that few have ever hope to acquire. Now he is qualified to teach computer languages. To get that qualification required a 95% pass and he did it with a number of different languages. 

In  the mid-1970s while I was taking night courses at York University, I was introduced to the email. Long before it became the vehicle of the Internet it was the vehicle of the University which allowed me to leave messages for my professors who were on the system. When I went back to school in the early 1990s to wait out the recession, I just happened to be there when the university connected up to the Internet. It was a thrilling time and initially only included north american webpages, generally created by young students with a computer knack. It was the time of the dot. com companies where millions were made by owning and selling the dot.com addresses of the big names like McDonalds, GM, and many other firms which had been cornered by those in the know.

My first computer cost $2275.00 back in the nineties. My latest, a rebuilt unit cost about $200. It works fine. My first printer bought in 1995, an HP 4L lazerjet printer cost $750 and it is still working. Today, HP sells lazer printers for $30 on sale. Times have certainly changed just as the Internet has changed the world. Me? Well, I just got older, wrote a lot of books and retired. After all, old computers never die, they just keep on computing.