Just talking to an old IBM mainframe guy originally from NY and for the last 30 years in Las Vegas.
My experience… I was working for an Apple dealership in Sydney and we were invited to become an IBM dealer. I got to see and learn about the 5150 a few months prior to release. This was my first experience with IBM as a company and I was in awe. I was amazed at how professional and organised everything was.
Really cool on the 5150. My first job was working for IBM marketing the PC/XT and the S/36. Selling the PC was the easiest job in the world and S/36 the hardest! IBM was quite something in those days.
When I was 10 years old I wrote a letter to IBM. Don’t remember what it said, but I was intrigued by computers then and wanted to know more so they must have seemed like an obvious place to start.
To my eternal surprise, they wrote back and sent me two programming manuals for the IBM 5100: one for BASIC and one for APL. They didn’t have to do that, of course, but somewhere in that big corporate behemoth somebody took the time to reply to some random kid. APL was so intriguing. This made a huge impact on my choice to become a programmer. I didn’t have access to a 5100, of course, or any computer at all at that point; but that’s how APL became the first programming language I (book) learned. I didn’t get to work on an actual APL capable computer until college. By then I got an internship at Apple; and that put an end to that track.
So IBM (and APL) will always have a warm place in my heart :-)
Hi Ben, That's a fantastic story. When I was at IBM, APL was the 'next big thing', which some thought was going to take over the world, which all seems a little strange in retrospect. My third job started with replacing a system written in APL running on an IBM mainframe with a PC based software package.
Just talking to an old IBM mainframe guy originally from NY and for the last 30 years in Las Vegas.
My experience… I was working for an Apple dealership in Sydney and we were invited to become an IBM dealer. I got to see and learn about the 5150 a few months prior to release. This was my first experience with IBM as a company and I was in awe. I was amazed at how professional and organised everything was.
Love that I got to experience this
That's great - I bet he had some stories to tell!
Really cool on the 5150. My first job was working for IBM marketing the PC/XT and the S/36. Selling the PC was the easiest job in the world and S/36 the hardest! IBM was quite something in those days.
When I was 10 years old I wrote a letter to IBM. Don’t remember what it said, but I was intrigued by computers then and wanted to know more so they must have seemed like an obvious place to start.
To my eternal surprise, they wrote back and sent me two programming manuals for the IBM 5100: one for BASIC and one for APL. They didn’t have to do that, of course, but somewhere in that big corporate behemoth somebody took the time to reply to some random kid. APL was so intriguing. This made a huge impact on my choice to become a programmer. I didn’t have access to a 5100, of course, or any computer at all at that point; but that’s how APL became the first programming language I (book) learned. I didn’t get to work on an actual APL capable computer until college. By then I got an internship at Apple; and that put an end to that track.
So IBM (and APL) will always have a warm place in my heart :-)
Hi Ben, That's a fantastic story. When I was at IBM, APL was the 'next big thing', which some thought was going to take over the world, which all seems a little strange in retrospect. My third job started with replacing a system written in APL running on an IBM mainframe with a PC based software package.