Send Ken To College

High school in Ottumwa, IA in the early 80’s…

High school was generally boring. I did well or I did badly. There were few C’s on my report cards. My grades were either low A’s or high B’s or they were D’s. I like classes like my history of western civilization class with Mr. Warren, I kind of enjoyed math class and I really like the time that I got to spend on what we would now call a PC.

My junior high and high school both had a TRS-80 Model II computer (one of which my slightly dubious acquaintance, Bob, has locked away). I was one of the few people allowed to lay hands on it and only because I had taught myself programming in BASIC. This was one bad-ass machine with it dual 5.25 inch floppy drives, 48K (yes, K not M) of memory and the cassette recorder so that we could write our programs to cassette tape.

In my senior year in high school they finally built a lab with 8 Apple IIc’s and IIe’s. This was before they became Macs. Mr. Stoneking, the science teacher, undertook a programming class which I happily joined. I was already well ahead of the curve since the Apple BASIC was pretty much what I had already learned. Mr. Stoneking had us do a final project which was to simulate a multiple listing service like a realtor might use. He stated we could use any resources open to us. That was my first professional programming gig. I sold copies of my code to classmates. I made a couple of hundred dollars which kept me in junk food and video games for awhile. I received an A- on that project because in the words of the teacher, “I got tired of seeing your code by the time I got to grade it”. Yes, I was considered a fair resource for this project and as such my classmates were allowed to purchase my code.

Fresh of this triumph I decide college was a good place for me so I packed up my 2.37 GPA and my 29 composite score on the ACT test and headed north to Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Forget computers, I discovered hard core partying and off I went…

To be continued!