Computers and me

                                      Computers and me
I was born before computers were invented. The first computers were housed in large rooms. When I was in college they did not have a computer at Weber College.
When I was in medical school they did not have any computers available to the students or most of the faculty. We did have a presentation in one of our classes by Dr. Homer Warner, but it was on servo systems and not really about computers.
Sinclair ZX 81

In 1980, British company Sinclair released their ZX80 computer for $199.95.
One year later, they released the new and improved ZX81. Compared to the ZX80, the ZX81 was much cheaper, at only $99.95, the first computer for under $100. The ZX81 had the same microprocessor and ran at the same speed as the ZX80, but it had a better BASIC programming language and was cheaper to produce, due to having fewer chips and a simpler design.
Although cheap and quite popular, the ZX81 was, well, cheap. The keyboard is a 'touch sensitive membrane', a flexible plastic surface with the actual switches under the surface. While easy to clean and water resistant, it was very difficult and slow to type on, because you had to press hard and very deliberately to use the tiny, closely-spaced keys. Touch-typing was impossible.
I had to assemble the computer by soldering the connections.  I also bought some expansion memory. We hooked it up to the TV for a monitor and used it mostly for games.

Commodore 64

The next computer that I had was a Commodore 64. Although it looked like an unimpressive keyboard-like box, the Commodore 64 was incredibly popular. More C64s had been sold than any other single computer system, even to this day. That's about 17 million systems, according to the Commodore 1993 Annual Report.

In a 1989 interview Sam Tramiel, then-president of Commodore, said that "When I was at Commodore we were building 400,000 C64s a month for a couple of years."

The C64's microprocessors support two high-resolution graphic modes, smooth scrolling, "sprites", bit mapping, character collision resolution and character mapped graphics, not to mention three channels of complex sound. All this make it an excellent game machine, which is what it excelled at the most, with thousands of software titles release and numerous peripherals to extend its capabilities.

Originally, the only method of storing your own data was on the proprietary Commodore Datasette recorder. It was rather slow, transferring data at only 300 baud.

A floppy drive was eventually released - the famous 1541. Famous for being very slow (serial), noisy, and prone to failure.

We used this for games.

I also bought a Commodore 128

This was a better computer, but still was not adapted to my medical practice. I wanted to be able to use a computer to do medical billing.

Computer billing out of house
I was using a pegboard system for recording the office patient visits. The account cards were then copied and sent as bills to the patient. We did this for quite some time.  I wanted to go to computer billing, because I felt that this was the wave of the future. There was a company that would do computer billing.  I had to send the information to the company and they would use their computer to generate bills. We had to the send them out to the patients.  I did not like this very well, so this never really go off the ground.  This occurred before we moved from Dr. Wilmoth's office to Capitol Hill.
Billing program from Dick Hunter's store in Riverton.
Dick Hunter was a member of the church that ran an office supply store in Riverton. It was a programmable machine, but not a personal computer. I had him program the machine and one of the office girls would key in the data and it would print out on letter size card stock which we would then copy with our Xerox copier and send out the bills that way.
Apple II plus 48k with two 137k floppy disk drives and Paper Tiger dot matrix printer $5000.

John wanted me to buy an Apple computer so that he could learn to program games. The Apple II Plus (stylized as Apple ][+) was the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer, Inc. It was sold new from June 1979 to December 1982. I wanted to use it for my office billing. I needed a program for billing that would run on the Apple computer. I do not know how I found a medical billing program that would run on the Apple computer, but I found one from someone in California. The bills would come out on pin feed paper with all the office encounters and payments detailed on each bill.  There were adjustments that needed to be made to tailor the way I wanted the program to work for me. Since it was written in Apple basic, I was able to write some code to personalize the output. We used two floppy drives and had to insert floppy disks quite often while using the program. I later added a 5 megabyte Corvus hard disk drive and we did not have to use the floppy disks except for backup.
I wanted to be an Apple computer dealer. At that time Apple decided to limit sales only through approved dealers. This cut me out, because there were no dealers in Wyoming.
Laser 128 computers with built in floppy

The Laser 128 was a clone of the Apple II series of personal computers, first released by VTech in 1984.
As its name suggests, the $479 Laser 128 had 128 KB of RAM. Like the Apple IIc, it was a one-piece semi-portable design with a carrying handle and a single built-in 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, and used the 65C02 microprocessor. Unlike the Apple IIc, it had a numeric keypad, a Centronics printer port, and two Laser 128-only graphics modes. The Laser 128 also had a single Apple IIe-compatible expansion slot, which gave it better expansion capabilities than a IIc, but cards remained exposed; the slot was intended for an expansion chassis that provided slots compatible with the Apple's Slot 5 and Slot 7. The computer also had a separate, internal memory-expansion slot. I sold these computers and programs to run on them to schools in the area along with Epson dot matrix printers.

This company also built an IBM compatible computer and we had one of these as well and used it at home.
IBM compatible computers
I kept getting mail advertising IBM compatible computers for sale. Compac was one of the companies selling IBM compatible computers. I decided to change from an Apple to IBM computer for billing. I used a program called Medical Manager. I sold Dr. Lang a computer and the Medical Manager billing program.
Computer annex
Clark came home from his mission and did not have a job. I suggested that he sell computers and we could set up an Apple computer dealership. We called the business Computer Annex. I would run the business out of my medical office. He was to be the outside salesman. Fortunately for him he got a job at the steel mine on South Pass. I kept the business and sold computers, printers, monitors and software.  I repaired and serviced the computers.

I then needed a program to do financial records and found one that would run on an IBM compatible computer. The name of this program was Books.  It would also do some billing, so I sold the program to a few businesses in town.
Iomega drives

Most external storage was done on floppy drives.  Then external and internal hard disc drives were introduced.  A company called Iomega was selling a high-density floppy drive with interchangeable disks. Initially they were 5 ½ inch floppies and later they came in 3 ½ inch drives.  I used these drives for backup data. 

CPM operating system computers

My brother Martell and a friend built computers running CPM operating systems with and 8086 processor. They were large and fit with Iomega drives.  I sold to these and Wayne Nelson and doctor Peter Crane bought them from me.  I found a pharmacy program for Wayne and Dr. Crane wrote his own program.  CPM computers as personal computers went out of style and gave way to Microsoft operating systems.
Computers for children at college.

Since computers were becoming more accessible, I tried to furnish my children with this advantage.  They were usually small and relatively inexpensive and equipped with a word processing program.  I hoped that this would help them with their schoolwork.

Laptops

I bought my first laptop computer just before we went on our mission to Germany. I used it while I was there to do e-mail using Outlook Express, which I had installed when I first got the Internet.  My brother, Martell, introduced me to the Internet. I also was hooked up to AOL at home before I went on our mission to Germany.  While I was in Germany there was a senior missionary working in the microfilm-processing center.  He had put together a computer that was IBM compatible, so I wanted to have one computer for my wife and I would use the laptop.  I went to the same store where the other senior missionary went and got the parts and put together our desktop computer.

We have had a number of laptop computers since then.  

Pison 3C

While we were on our mission to Germany there was another AMA there who covered the Europe West Area.  His name was Dr. Homer Warner. He was a professor of medical informatics at the University of Utah before he retired. He wrote a program using Microsoft Access that would keep track of the calls that we received about the health issues of the missionaries.   He had a hand held computer called a Pison 3C.  It was manufactured in England and would sync with the desktop computer.  It had a built in word processing and a database program, which I programmed to log missionary encounters by mission and missionary.  It was 6.5x3.25 inches and 0.5 inches thick.  It was lightweight and powered by AA batteries. It synced with the desktop with a serial connection and was easy to use.

Dr. Warner wanted a new version, so I bought this from him and started using it.  It was very useful when we were on the road or out of the office. I would still use it, but all of my computers now do not have serial ports.

Palm Pilot

When we got home from our missions my children gave me a Palm Pilot for my birthday.

This I used for a while and then bought my son Phillip’s Palm Vx. I used this for notes and the GPS functions.

iPhone

The next computer that I purchased was an iPhone.  Most people do not think of this as a computer, but it really is a computer with a phone built in. I use it for the Internet, for GPS, a word processor, a voice recorder, a scanner, a camera, a database and a library. It has all the functions of what I use my laptop computer for in a small unit that fits in my shirt pocket. I also own an iPad and we have four of them, but only use two.  Alice likes hers and does Facebook and e-mail has the scriptures and church related material.

I have never had any formal instruction or training in most of the computers and programs that I use.  I probably would be better if I did. I did take an adult education class while we were living in Lander on Photoshop and took a class on a cruise that covered the Windows Live Photo program, but unless you use these on a regular basis, mastery is not achievable.

At the present time I have a very old desktop computer with maxed out memory, three laptop computers and Alice has a desktop computer. 

So in conclusion computers have been a part of my life for a number of years and will continue to be.

Love,

Grandpa