Starting to Code at 60

The millennium came and went and we followed the celebrations from New Zealand through Asia Pacific, West Asia, Europe on to the US until the sun went down over the West Coast. I was by then, flying quite regularly to the US mainland as many companies had set up shop in China. After working in Asia for a few years, the scale of industry in the US was a real eye-opener. Even items as small as electronic watches were shipped in tractor-trailer loads. We learned that the movements (a component of a watch) manufactured in Japan was three times the cost of one manufactured in China. We learned of currency difference profit and loss accounts, of gold prices on the London exchange, of factors and advance payments, of the innumerable contract laws across countries, of accounting systems and statutory reporting requirements. We learned of "ship-or-kill", a practice probably unique to Walmart vendors, item coding systems, batch numbering. We learned the difference between disc...

When I finally decided to quit the Army early, I had to choose a new profession. I worked through an inventory of interests, mostly aerosports! Obviously, I could do nothing with those.  I liked travel and photography. Maybe a career in cinematography? A quick afternoon trip to the Film and Television Institute in Poona put me off cinema permanently. Here was an institute in crisis and by the looks of it (I just spoke to the guard and what he told me was enough!!) nothing was going to change. On my way back from FTII, I decided to come through the university to see what they offered in PG programs. And then I saw this board "CDAC ACTS" and that was that! CDAC was our super computer heros - the guys who developed Param, India's first super computers. And ACTS was they computer school. I knew I din't have to travel up till the University office for a program brochure. My new career would be in computers. But what in computers? I decided to do the six-month progra...

I dint use much of Fortran during the 80s even though I had become reasonably conversant with it. In the Bachelors program, the Casio fx-82 calculators were much more popular than anything computers or Fortran could throw at us. So that was that. It served our purpose well and it was to become our workhorse. Nothing anyone said could convince me to write pages and pages of code on code sheets and then sit an input that into that green black hole! Of course DOS 2.x and 3.x became a lot more friendly and by the time DOS 5.x came around with its shell, things were moving along quite rapidly in the computer world. But then, computers were not very popular in military units and other than some rudimentary word processing, I was not even sure what they were utilized for. Databases like DBase, FoxPro were popular by then and there were even a couple of spreadsheet programs. VisiCalc was the first, but then anyone who could work those numbers on Lotus 123 were the gods! So it was n...

Of course I used to code sometime in prehistory! Which other idiot wants to learn to code again!! But it was breadboards, 4044/8088s and assembly in those days until something hot came up on the horizon - DOS 1.0. Disk Operating System or something!! Had to struggle to figure it out as the green screen just sat there staring back at you without saying a thing! Not even a prompt. All those little crumbs could fall right into those holes leaving just the slices on it "You can setup a prompt of your choice, if you want", said our computer instructor, who had this devil-may-care attitude and the philosophy that computers were for those who were interested in it. Only! We had to pick up a language before we went for our engineering degree programs and Fortran was the language of choice. My nemesis  And the work started on some sort of gridded paper that looked similar to graph paper only you wrote characters on it, not lines. The coding sheet Computers and...