Overdrive 
Friday, August 17, 2007, 09:31 PM
Posted by Administrator
In The World of Mathematics, James Newman writes about Truman Henry Safford, who, at the age of ten, was able to square an 18-digit number in his head in less than a minute. While he was performing this incredible feat, however, he “flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking.”

There are many days when I feel like that boy. Give me a minute to explain.

In 1965, I learned to program on an IBM 1620 (pictured). It was the size of a desk, but much heavier, owing to the fact that the 20k of memory in the base consisted of little hunks of iron (several years later, when I was teaching at the Woodberry Forest School, I broke my car jack trying to move the school’s 1620 a few inches.)

I learned Fortran and assembly language on the 1620, which was pretty much what there was at the time. In 1977, when I left high school teaching to work as a programmer, the computer landscape was still very familiar. I worked for a couple of consulting companies in Washington on a wide range of projects, and while the problems were harder, the tools were essentially the same (mostly Fortran, with sprinkles of 360 assembly language and SAS).

In 1982, I started one company, in which I created Dr. Halo and other graphics tools, and later helped start (with Garry McDaniels) a second company, which produced the SkillsBank (now SkillsTutor) educational products. A lot of my work focused on the hardware (you try to make an Apple II do something interesting), but bit by bit, the hardware and the software tools evolved. I moved to C++ in 1996, which was a conceptual shift, but a completely natural one. It reminded me of a homology course I had taken in graduate school, in which the ideas of group theory and topology, already fairly abstruse, were abstracted one level further.

When I left SkillsBank in 1998, the web was not a factor in our development efforts. We were selling to the educational market, which had always been a step behind the times. We still produced Apple II versions of our products, for example, until 1994.

After SkillsBank, I went back to college, taught high school for several years, and now, nine years after I left it, have returned to the world of computers. I haven’t completely lost touch with technology – my work in education had led me to create a few web sites and develop some Flash applications – but a whole lot had changed behind my back. XML, Java, DOM, Ajax, PHP, MySQL, C#, Flex, Ruby. Not only are there a lot of acronyms, but I’m learning that if you want to accomplish anything useful, you actually have to know how to use them. On any given day, you’ll find me in my office, channeling Truman Henry Safford, all systems on overdrive.

What do you have to know now to make a living in the software world? This is what I’m going to write about. Along the way I will explain some of the technical problems I have encountered and solved in my work on various projects, and what I have found to be the best tools.

Next week: how to write a Google gadget.


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