Why I went to college, Part 3 of 3

Yesterday, I showed you how my graduate career was a healthy mix of science and computer programming. I checked out the job market in science and it was pretty sucky so I decided to take a one year post-doc at Northwestern to avoid the issue one final time. I spent 11 out of the 12 months writing another stimulus application/response monitoring computer system. I spent very little time actually doing science. I exited the program in 1981 and now I had to get a job so I went to work for my father as, get this, a programmer, creating display signs, instrumentation, hardware, whatever.

In 1992, we built the on-screen display of the election results when Ross Perot ran against Bill Clinton and George Bush. The graphical display was written on a Commodore 64 and the giant tote board were using our proprietary microcomputer.

Things got better and better and soon my Dad would get a job that would take two weeks to deliver and I would have all the software done in an hour or so. I created my own computer language (MAIL - Microsport Array Indexing Language), my own in-circuit emulator (ICE), a serial port buffer, a bank-switching EPROM board to hold the steam equations and so on. Finally, I decided to get a full-time job working for somebody else and just do my programming for my Dad as a consultant.

I worked for Ancier Technologies, Intelligo, Micro Endeavors and finally started my own company, Visual Software Solutions in 1995. We were briefly owned by MHA in 1999 and then re-emerged as Vega Applications Development in 2000. Here it is 2017, 50 years after my first computer science class and computers are still not writing their own code. So my Dad (who has since passed away) was wrong but I don't regret the career course I took. I love what I do and I love the depth of experience getting a degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in neuroscience gave me.

And as you all know, we have come to realize, the day that computers start writing their own code, that will be the end of mankind because then they will have no use for us. So thank you Dad for the inspiration for my hero, Rei Bierak, my career, and the ability to serve as canary in the coal mine writing about MASAL in the 35th century.