I don’t know much about computers. Compared to today’s 12-year-old, I’m an ignoramus. I come from a prehistoric generation, when phones were connected by wire, when electric ovens were new, when there were no cell phones, no smart phones, no email, no texting, no caller ID, no call waiting, no message phones, no answering machines, no internet — you got it: none of that stuff. In my time, the telephone was magic. You could dial a number and get an answer. In our case we had a “party line.”
That was a deal where several “parties” shared a common phone line. If you picked up your phone and your neighbor, a “party,” was using the phone, you hung up and waited. Or if you were on your phone and you heard a “click,” you knew someone on your party — among several sharers on that one phone line — was listening in. You can imagine the responses: “Linda, are you listening in on me?” Click. Linda’s gone. If you needed to make a crucial call, and someone was on the line, you’d have to ask Drema, or John, or whoever, to please hang up; you have a crisis call to make.
The phone numbers in South Charleston — an upgrade city, because of Union Carbide — were 5 digits long. Our number was 42807. No prefix. No sir. Of course the phones were rotary dial phones where you had to put your finger in a hole corresponding to the number you wanted to dial, then swing it around to the right and let go. You got that? I didn’t think so; the technology was beyond your grasp. Haha.
After dialing each number in that manner, you’d get through. If you were lucky, and no one on your party was listening in. Which they did, old biddies. Eventually, communications technology improved. At some point, about 1954, they added prefix numbers. Like, “Pennsylvania,” numbers “72,” etc., which denoted the first two digits of the number to be dialed. Of course, this was in place in New York City long before our WV time. Consider the Glenn Miller tune “Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand.” That was a phone number of the hotel the band stayed in, back in the late 1930s. It was the number of the Pennsylvania Hotel, and the band decided it was worth a song title. So our West Virginia system in the late ‘40s was about twenty years behind the times.
All that said, look at the history of computers dating back to those times. And then came WWll, and the development of even more sophisticated communications and data storage equipment. Finally, in the 1950s, the famed IBM 1401 series pretty well revolutionized the communications/storage/computer age.
The reason I say all this is that I’m still amazed at the computer age. When I was working in Roanoke County Schools on our scheduling project (written up elsewhere here), we had an IBM 1401 computer. Archaic, yes. Capable, yes. I even took a course in programming with the 1401 language: Autocoder. The input was by punched cards, and each card had to be manually punched — and then manually verified. No such thing as a computer keyboard. The mouse hadn’t even been dreamed about. And it worked for us. But we needed much greater computing power for our project, and worked a deal with Virginia Tech to use their system, a state-of-the-art lab with the latest equipment. Our scheduling package required an astounding — yes, I said astounding — 128K of usable workspace to generate a high school master schedule. I have no real idea what 128K means today, since everything is measured in gigabytes or terabytes, thousands of times more powerful. The VPI computer system (IBM Series 360) capability was, I think, 256K. Unreal. And the computer lab consumed about 2,000 square feet of space, housing the mainframe computer, the card reader, disc drives, tape drives, and all, resting on top of an under-the-floor myriad of cables, air conditioning, and so on. It was a huge space. Today, that same capability can be housed on a small desk. And we’re still in the embryonic stage of computer technology.
I surely don’t mean by any of this to profess any knowledge or vision about computer technology. In the 60s, I was able to understand the parameters as well as the specifics of our computer package, which was actually a set of programs created at MIT; I could provide input in proper form; I could keypunch cards accurately; I could read the input stream to a computer, gather and trim the output, analyze the reports, make changes in the input, initiate the next run, look at the next outputs, etc. etc. Most of that was mechanical stuff. My only real skill was in reading and interpreting the outputs; making decisions that would improve the final output, which translated into good results for kids in their academic programs. I could not write code except on a very basic level. I could not have discussions with tech support personnel. I could not tell you anything about hex programming and other weird stuff. In short, I was never, and never will be, a competent computer person. So I guess I had just enough knowledge to be a pest. And I refused to be that, so I tried my best to work with Tom Farrell, the former IBMer who knew how to make an IBM 1401 turn cartwheels, providing him with educator-based calls on what to change or keep from a particular computer run, in the interest of good schedules for students, computer be damned.
In 1981, while serving as superintendent of Greenbrier County Schools, I became aware of the new kid on the block, the Apple. At that time there were virtually no computers in classrooms except in specialized programs such as vocational education. But the Apple changed all that. I suppose my enthusiasm was borne of my personal experiences with data processing, but whatever the reason, I was able to initiate one of the first school computer labs in the state. Oddly enough, I left my position that fall, and never got to see the results of the hard work it took to convince people that computers were “here to stay in our schools.” Of course, the rest is history.
Today, the iMac I’m writing on has more power than that lab at VPI in 1968. I suppose I should be astounded, and in some ways I am, except that I am also cognizant that we’re on the burning edge of something we can’t even imagine. I’d love to be around in another 80 years; it’s going to be a time to make all of today’s capability appear as ice-age stuff. Except for the ‘human’ element, which will not go away. So, I was born before the computer age. I participated in it to a limited extent — but far more than most of my uninitiated contemporaries. I learned to respect it, to acknowledge it, to rely on it in controlled situations, to admire it, to fear it, but never to embrace it fully. Yes, it is a time of marvels. But when was it not? So then, what comes after computers? Wish I could be around for that, to act like a curmudgeon.