My Life with Computers

I’ve always had a mixed relationship with computers and IT. The recent Vocal upgrades brought back memories of my past computer mistakes.

When I was in school, there was no such thing as a laptop like the ones in today's school systems. I was not introduced to the gremlin called a computer until year one at university. For some reason, computer science was a compulsory part of my biology course. Who knows why? Back then, you had those huge mainframe computers. They took up a whole room and made the lights dim when they started.

It was bad enough, but an element of that court was programming. You needed to develop programs for basic tasks. These were done manually by punching symbols on a series of cards. The cards were handed to a technician, and two days later, you went back to find out whether you were successful.

I often struggled to succeed. I either mixed up the card order or had spots that weren't fully punched out.

I survived the rest of my university days quite well, without a computer. We didn't even have mobile phones in those days. When I was working on my master's thesis, computers reared their ugly heads again. It was when Mac computers first came out. Everyone was writing their theses on Mac computers using 31/2” floppy discs.

The department had four or five computers that you had to book time on when you wanted to use them. Very few people had their own computers. I still didn’t trust the floppy disks at first. Everything that went on the computer was taken from my handwritten notes.

Just as well. The first few discs I filled, I accidentally left in the sunlight one day. Let’s just say they did not respond well to a suntan! I ended up with over 50 discs. The most you could get on a disk was 2.88 MB, but most were 1.44 MB. I needed a large box just to move them around!

That was not my most significant challenge at that time. I was categorising bacterial populations in koalas. This involved identifying different bacterial species through about 50 biochemical tests. I had over 600 isolates. That equates to 30,000 test results that had to be compared.

Bring back the programming! The issue was that the programming I learned in my degree didn’t help at all. The computers had changed a lot since then. I worked with another student studying fungi in leaf litter. Together, we created a program to compare our results, although it was mainly his.

I thought I had everything sorted. Then one day, I entered the computer room, loaded my program, and ran a dry test with 100 isolates over 20 tests. Away it went, and went, and went!

Somewhere, I had a full stop (period) in the wrong place, which told it to print one result on every sheet of paper. The printer went crazy, spitting out page after page, each with one figure.

The manager of the computer room was not impressed. I was banned until I could prove my program had been fixed.

After the other guy sorted it out, my job was to load all the results into the computer. Then, I had to save them as a data file for the big finale: the comparison matrices.

I had to work at night because I had a day job to fund my studies. Four nights a week, I went in and spent most of the night tying in data.

One night, I had typed in about three hours' worth of data when I pressed the wrong key, and everything went blank. When the computer rebooted, I couldn't recover my file. I was so mad I told it to get fuc***.  The response was so precise I could not help but laugh.

“Fucke file not found.”

I am much better these days, but still wrestle with IT.  I still get frustrated when something that seems logical just doesn’t happen.

Till next time,

Calvin