Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Oh geez, nearly forgot..........

1st plane ride was back in 1976, I was in Jr high.

there was a nationwide, I think, or state wide program to take school kids to Washington DC for the Bicentennial to do a one night / two day sightseeing tour.

It cost more than a few bucks, my father probably wasn't in favor, but it was much cheaper than it should have been.  

Gerald Ford must have subsidized the trip.

I used a slide rule all through HS.  I got a TI SR-10 in college, 1972.  We used to have slide rule speed competitions between linear and circular slide rulers.  I think I still have mine, a metal yellow slide rule.

I almost changed majors to computer programming.

We had to buy one and I probably used it like 5 times.  

I wore the keys off that SR-10, and a couple years later moved up to the TI SR-50, which was quite a bit better.  We had races between folks with the HP type which used RPN instead.  I used both.  Meh.  That was a bit like the Apple vs Microsoft wars.  Remember when we had two types of video tapes and then two types of DVDs?

I recall in HS there were for basketball shoes Converse and I think PF Flyers.  Converse were more popular.  I don't know of a third brand.

My first computer was the IBM PC which I still have bought in 1985

I'm sure a few of you have heard of the computer game genre known as "Tank Wars" or "Scorched Earth"... Basically a 2D game where you had any number of tank or artillery positions and you had to attack them via a variety of weapons and selecting your angle and power...



When I was a senior in high school, I took a computer science class where we were programming in... I think Pascal, on the Apple IIgs. 

Within the first couple of days, I realized this class was a joke. We had three weeks to learn and practice a "for" loop, followed by three weeks to learn and practice "if-then" statements, etc... 

I knew immediately that it was going to bore the crap out of me. So I wrote a version of Scorched Earth for the Apple IIgs as my final project, starting early in the semester. It even required writing an entire section of subroutines to create text characters because there was no inherent ability to overlay text over graphics, so I had to have routines to draw every single letter and number. It randomized the terrain and the location of every tank, and obviously I had to write routines that would determine hit vs miss to know when a tank was destroyed. It even included multiple weapons, wind force, etc. 

All the final project was required to demonstrate was use of each of the main programming tasks we had learned. Mine clearly exceeded that goal. I got an A. 

Blasphemy!

splain yourself