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First time I was paid for programming
Posted by Nelson Asinowski on 16 Nov 2001, 3:45 p.m.
During my last year of high school I went on a tour of a local Junior College and saw a machine printing out biorythms. The next year I went to that college and found the lab where the HP9830a with plotter was located. I learned to program on that machine. They also had several desktop HP calculators so I learned to use them too. Through people I met there I got work in a local store that sold calculators. I learn to program the HP 25 there.
Somebody at the store gave my name to a stock broker who need some programming done on a HP67. They had a group of 3 HP-65 programs that they used for some of their calculations. The sequence took them 15 minutes to do. They did not like having to load the next program from the cards so they bought an HP67 and tried to load the program all in memory at once. They didn't fit.
They gave me the 67 and all the manuels for the weekend. I looked through the code and found that all three used number of days between date routines. I recoded the routine as a subroutine everything fit with room to spare. I took the money I earned from this job and bought a HP-29C (about $300 Can) which I still have to this day. I was in a computer science degree at that time and I did lots of silly programs for the 29. I wrote a quicksort routine for it. It could sort 26 numbers in about 5 minutes. I might even have my old hand copies listing of the code somewhere
Edited: 18 Aug 2004, 3:11 p.m.
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