I graduated from BYU in August of 1971 with a Bachelor of Engineering Science degree. During my last year at BYU, I took took classes which were to change my life forever. One was in basic Computer Science and the other was in the language FORTRAN. FORTRAN is no longer used anywhere, to my knowledge, but it was big in the 70’s. I decided that I really liked computers. In 1971, they were still something that was pretty new. The most sophisticated game on the computer was Pong. In fact, I’m not sure Pong was even invented yet at that point. I knew I didn’t want to go back to fixing keypunches, so I called my old boss at IBM in New Orleans and asked him if the company had any openings for programmers. IBM had to take me back since I was on a leave of absence, but they didn’t have to give me a new job. They could have put me right back into the old one I had before. I had decided I would quit if they tried to do that, so I went after a programming job.
I should explain that 1971 was a very bad year for college graduates. Nixon was the president and he had managed to screw up the economy so badly that it was really tough to find jobs. It was the end of the Vietnam War. There were political cartoons in the paper which showed PhD graduates working at McDonalds and things like that. I would estimate fully half of my graduating class did not have job offers when we walked down the aisle and graduated. IBM had to take me back, but they did not have to be nice about it.
But they were. I still think to this day that they are one of the greatest companies in this country (or they used to be). I’m grateful I could work for them for almost 3o years. My boss told me that the only place he knew about that was hiring programmers was in Morristown, New Jersey. So, he set it up and I took a trip out there to look it over and interview for a job. I had two choices, take the job and move to New Jersey or stay in school and go to graduate school. The second choice meant leaving IBM forever.
Dad