My view on technology

At college we had 4 courses for development, those where more focused for us to had Language knowledge. Those classes were Pascal , GW-BASIC , COBOL and FoxPro , in that order. Programming Logic was an issue in those times as classes where focus to the language and not to the logic; also, not all of us had a computer at home, so, we had to visit the Lab for computer time. Time might not be too expensive, but availability was another issue. At Pascal course, I had some problems with coding as I as to create big programs, most of them long IF Statements and the following of my core was hard to other persons, I took little attention to this issue until tow more courses. In a midterm exam, my teacher, Engineer Diana Margarita (Diana Margarita is guilty of my carrer), gave me a low grade for my code, I had to type it in the PC and show her the result to reconsider my grade. Second course was GW-BASI, this course was given by Engineer Danilo, he had a “different” way to teach, but was ...

My father spent many years as a Teacher in the Universidad Regiomontana (also see this ) and he made an arrangement with computer lab to let me go and “practice” with the computers they had a t that time. I spent many hours, when the lab was free, programming in basic and playing in those computers. A game I remember is Karateka ; at that time I was at High School and was taking some Karate classes of ShitoKai and that game took my attention. At high school we had classes of BASIC , I previously used BASIC for my First big program, so this course was not quite exceptional for me, but I took some practice with the programs I created.

When I start college, back in late 80, I start using more often the PC. In Mexico there were little penetration form PC for an average citizen; most computers were in Companies or Universities. As I decided to study a computer science engineering, part of the homework we were to do requires to be created using a PC. When I start, the common storage was 5 1/4 inches Diskettes , the available storage was 360KB. Initially those were single sided, but with a notch on one edge you could turn the diskette in the reader to make if double sided, we can naw stored 720KB. Later, diskette reader evolved to read both sides without flipping the floppy disk. Some common thing was to store all your stuff in the same diskette: The Operative System ( MS-DOS at that time). Word Processor, a common software was ChiWriter I also remember having Professional Write at the same time. Personal Files, sometimes you could have all homework from the year Most of the computer had no hard drive and, consequ...