Bob's History

Because I'm a private person when it comes to personal life.

 

Way back in the day when I was just a kid. Early 70's. My Uncle was a Physic's Professor at the University of Montana. One weekend that we visited him, he took me and my sister to the University to show us the Physics Labs. One of the things he showed us was the Physics department computer system (was a VAX Mainframe). It was that moment that I was interested in computers. My Dad worked at a Bank and the bank had computer systems. After school I would go to the bank and hang out in the basement watching the computer programmers. They took time to teach me some of the basics (COBOL and FORTRAN) and let me help on simple stuff. All of the code at the time was printed out on paper so one of my "learning" tasks was reading through all the code to find syntax errors. When I'd find something, I'd highlight it and then they'd review it and any mistakes I found, I got to fix them. I learned a lot by doing that and also brnached out on my own learning different types of BASIC and Machine Language on my own. When I got into high school, the IBM PC and Tandy PCs were being introduced into homes, so Computer Science was starting to be a thing in school. Of course, I knew more than my teacher did, so I ended up being his "helper" and pretty much ran the labs and maintained all the systems in the school. THAT is how I got started.

Yes, phpBB and vBulletin.

Jeremy (XF Staff member).