computer programming
once upon a time.... it seems like that now. it didn't then. I was twenty-three and supposed to earn a living for my family (I had a wife and a child at the time). I had graduated from college with a physics degree, I had found a job as an engineering employee at The Boeing Company, and I still didn't know what the hell I was going to do. I had read about engineers, and what I and the people around me were doing wasn't what engineers I had read about did. an engineering employee with five or six years experience told me not to worry about books and just do what I was told. not very satisfying. my boss came to me one day and told me he had a job for me that no one else wanted, but since I had the least seniority in the group I had to take it. that seemed about right. but what he wanted me to do was program a computer. well, I didn't know anything about computers and I didn't know anything about programming - this was back in 1965 and computers were about twenty years old and almost everyone didn't know much about computers and programming! - so the first thing they had to do was send me to some classes. basically I went to a "What is a computer?" class, then a "What is programming?" class. god in heaven! I thought someone must have invented computers for me to play with, and invented programming so I could trick computers into doing what my bosses wanted. but the second thing they had me do was take some more classes, "What is assembly-level programming?" and "What is programming in Fortran?" mercy! then I got to work with some engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a program we were going to use to track the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft on its way to the Moon and while it orbited the Moon. what? well, like in all good stories, I've skipped a few details, but the essence of the story is true, and I did get to work with JPL engineers on the Orbit Determination Program for Lunar Orbiter within weeks of learning what a computer was. and I worked programming computers for most of 46 years after that. I'm still infatuated with computers, and still think that computer programming is the best puzzle-solving available. it was and is a wonderful way to earn a living, and the way it's done now has little apparent relationship to the way we did it back back when computers were nearly new. still, I bet you can find dozens of young men and young women focused intently on the computer programming they're doing, each of them grinning, and each of them with eyes alight as if they were making love instead of dragging coal out of a mine.
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