How Talking Over A Wall Changed My Direction As A Programmer

I started my programming career in October 1981 at a large defense contractor (GD). At the time, my goal was to work for a few years and then pursue a PhD. PhD in Chemistry (I have been accepted).

The office I work in has an entire floor, occasionally separated by cubic walls. Most of us work at metal desks in open areas. Since this was the early 1980s, no one had a computer on their desk, and all the terminals were placed in bullpens with sign-up forms attached.

On the wall opposite my desk is a small team of two called the “microcomputer team.” Their job was to plan and promote the introduction of PCs (general term, not just IBM or clones) into the company. The manager and I started talking through the wall because we both had Apple IIs at home. We shared our adventures with them. He’s not a programmer, he’s a tinkerer.

One Friday in the fall of 1983, he told me through the wall that some people from headquarters and various departments had come to talk about the Apple II and invited me to come along. I thought it would be a fun diversion from my day job (I think I’m still testing the Jovial compiler we’re building). Little did I know that this would change the direction of my life.

The meeting was chaired by a number of people I didn’t know, including two vice presidents and today’s chief information officer (that title was not used at the time). Apparently, the president of the company asked someone to develop an application so that he could read e-mail at home on the Apple II he had purchased for his son. At the time, email was only available to senior executives (or, more often, their secretaries), and reading email at home was unheard of. They ignored him because there was a commercial application available for purchase (VT-100 Terminal Emulator) that they thought they could purchase if he persisted. However, when they tried it, he got angry and insisted on building it in-house, so he gave them some kind of ultimatum, so they panicked. So the purpose of this meeting was to find someone to not only build a VT-100 emulator on an Apple II (which only had a 40-column screen), but do it within a week!

So when they asked who could write 6502 assembly on the Apple II, I raised my hand, thinking everyone here was a programmer, only to find out I was the only one who raised my hand! So they fired the others and explained to me what I had to do.

The job was to write a VT-100 terminal emulator (called the St. Louis Data Unit) in 6502 assembly and display 80 columns of data (somehow) on a 40-column screen. All I wanted was a few manuals, some sample code provided by Apple for communicating with a Hayes modem, an Apple III with a development environment, and an Apple II with a modem, and seven full days. Plus, they’ll stay local – I guess they’re worried about their jobs or something.

I had written some stuff in assembly language at work, but all I knew about the 6502 was playing around with the code at home. None of the projects I’ve worked on have had a UI, and I’ve never done any communications programming. Of course there was no Stackoverflow, open source, the web or anyone I could turn to for help.

Somehow I was able to build the app, figure out how to flip the screen to display 80 columns of messages, and build the app the next Saturday where I could demonstrate it using their login. I worked all night last night (they fed me terrible pizza at 2am, which caused some delays in the pizza “coming back”). It worked, and the president was excited.

Now, I decided to complete a somewhat impossible task and I wanted to join the microcomputer team. My manager’s manager said no, but I used my new friends at the top to get in.

Soon I was the only PC (Apple and IBM) programmer at the largest defense contractors I knew of in the world. I had a great time with that manager and we both got email addresses on the local bulletin board, but the only people we knew we could email to were each other. After a year, I left and ended up starting my first company.

Basically, talking through the wall and attending that random meeting gave me the idea that I should stick with programming and never look back.

About 15 years later, I met that manager again when he was dying of kidney disease. I spent the day with him, driving him around so he could take some photos and then having lunch together. We didn’t talk much about work, mainly that he wanted to get out of bed and see the world.

He died soon after. But I will always remember how our shared interests changed the direction of my life.

(Today I create generative art, please watch my website)