New Friends

33

When not writing, or at College, or at work, or noticing my continued wasting away, I spent time with friends. Mostly Jeff, but as the years had gone on I had gained Pat, the one who had replaced me at the software start-up. 'Karl', 'Wayne', and 'Chet' were friends of Jeff's whom I'd come to know and had been trying to get a Dungeons & Dragons group formed around. 'Dan' and 'Shelia' were husband and wife science fiction enthusiasts from Denver who not only attended their group, but had been coming to our little city to help found our science fiction club and be monthly attendees. While trying to befriend some of the folks I worked with or went to College with, nothing much ever came of that beyond a brief chat about the weather during breaks.

In the case of the Dungeons & Dragons group, we simply didn't have enough people to make it fun, still we got together at my mother's mobile home off and on over the previous year on Friday evenings to give it a go. It seemed to me Pat and I had become the closest friends given our common computer programming, music, and writing interests. As Nineteen Eighty-Six progressed, he had successfully moved from the defunct software start-up to other software firms in town and had his work successfully published and was even toying with redefining floating point arithmetic. We would often get together to trade recently finished stories, debate the latest music group, and even philosophy. By the end of the year, he had found himself a regular girlfriend and was eying marriage and his first house.

Dan's and my friendship centered mostly on our music interests and trading record albums to listen to between science fiction club meetings. In fact, if not for the allure of his record collection, I might not have even bothered with the local science fiction group as it often seemed they would just get together each month to wonder what they should do with the coming meetings and never settle on anything, only to repeat the process all over again with the next meeting. My favorite part of the group was when it ended and we would go out and get a table at the nearby diner for an additional two hours. For some reason, when no longer dwelling on what the group should be doing at the next meeting, they livened up... Or maybe it was just the food.

The club had permanently reserved the community room at a local bank for our once a month Saturday night gatherings and I once again arrived at the December meeting to simply trade albums with Dan. As it turned out he was sitting apart from the group, I settled down next to him and we chatted about what else we had in our libraries to trade in the next month. It was then that I noticed the 'fresh faces' at the meeting table, two new girls were here and had gotten the group off the topic of what to do for the next years' meetings and instead onto the topic of who these new girls were and what they did. Once Dan and I had agreed upon the following month's record trade, I scooted my chair up to the table to hear more about the new girls.

Both were teachers who had recently moved to town and were exploring the various local social options. Of the two girls one was the shy one, 'Daina', and the other the gregarious one, 'Rochelle'. Rochelle was making the biggest splash while Daina mostly talked when asked questions. It turned out Daina had the science fiction interests more than Rochelle, but when Rochelle heard about the monthly meetings she had encouraged Daina to get out of her apartment and actually attend this night. Daina was about nine years older than me whereas Rochelle was only a few. Soon the group got ready for the post meeting dinner and the two girls joined us. This gave me a better chance to talk with just the girls and I struck while I could: ''Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?''

Neither had but were willing to give it a try and we were at my home the following month to learn about the game, and join in. We finally had barely enough players to make the game fun but, as it turned out, we now had more people than my mother was willing to let me have at her place after a week or two. Given the need to find a new home for the game, Daina offered her apartment and we spent the next several Fridays there getting their characters ironed out and into the first adventure. Ultimately the group still failed. After a long day of work, Wayne routinely fell asleep and would start to snore, Chet was finishing up his Senior year of High School and would soon be away to a traditional College and Karl was Karl. He kind of reminded me of my childhood friend who lived at the defunct dairy farm, part charm and part mischief, but in the case of Karl there was also a randomness to him and we never knew if he was going to show up or not to each game, leaving us to wait for him needlessly or wonder what to do about his character in the game when he wasn't there.

But the girls kept on searching for new social activities in town and found that a new 'writers group' was forming where a bunch of writing enthusiasts would share their work with each other and cajole themselves into getting published one day. As they learned I dabbled in writing, the girls let me know of the group and we attended its first meeting along with a few more of the science fiction clubbers. Being at the same south end of town, with the writing group at the organizer's home to the north end, the girls and I soon car pooled and within a few years time one would become my best friend and the other not.

As for me, though, the clock was winding down.

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The New Boss

32

As more students trickled from the Business College to the associated accredited College, the flow of students on Saturdays to catch-up on classwork also dwindled. After the spring quarter of Nineteen Eighty-Six, the weekend office staff decided they weren't really needed any more and gave me the spare set of keys and showed me how to open the doors, turn off the alarm system and turn on the lights for Saturdays, and the opposite routine for the end of the day eight hours later. From June onward it was just me as the only paid presence at the school on Saturdays, I was even more my own boss.

When I had started as the Computer Monitor & Tutor I had a high of six students filter into the computer room during the day who needed to catch-up and would sometimes ask for help. The majority of my time, after performing morning backups, I would sit at the teacher's desk and use his control terminal to explore the TI-990 computer system until I had learned every corner I could, then see what types of things I could code with it. By this Spring, I had exhausted that line of interest and was back to either writing code into notebooks for when I'd get back home to my new IBM PC clone, or combing through printouts of recent PC code in search of logic bugs and chances for improvement. By this summer quarter, I'd be lucky if I had two students come in during the course of the day needing to use the computer, and rarely needing my help at all.

When there were other staff members on site, I would take a quick break to pickup some mid-day junk food but as the only one I now had to get everything on the way to the College to keep me busy for the next eight hours. When the only one there, I'd roam the single floor building and peek into classrooms I had once had classes in and remember a brief highlight or two. By the end of the summer quarter, I started to bring in my stories to proof read & edit in the computer room as there wasn't enough people around to notice it wasn't computer related.

Then one Saturday in August I opened the building and walked to the office in my thirty second time period to type in the alarm code to disarm it and... It didn't work. I tried again, no luck and the alarm went off. What do you do? I opened up the closet where the main alarm system was stored, and found a company contact number emblazoned on the box and called, letting them know of the problem and it being a false alarm. They said they'd send someone out to disable the alarm and, while it blared, I went to the computer room to get the morning backups started, then returned to the office to wait. I decided to call the Headmaster's phone number and let him know, but was only able to leave a message on his answering machine. His was the only number I had to call if there was a problem.

About a half hour later the alarm company rep showed up and asked me what had happened, I told him and he checked the system and couldn't figure out why the alarm code hadn't worked. As he opened-up the guts of the system two police officers arrived and wanted to know what was going on, I told them and they asked for my Employee Identification to prove that I worked here. The school had never issued one so we brainstormed how I could prove I had a right to be there. We came up with me showing them I had the keys that could lock the door and unlock it again as well as the classrooms. They felt that was good enough as the alarm company rep was there as well and finally got the alarm stopped after about an hour of it sounding continuously. The rep had it reset to its initial state and I needed to type in the code I wanted for it to be ready for rearming at the end of the day, I used the only code I had ever been told and once the rep left, I called the Headmaster's phone number again and left a message that the problem was resolved and the code reset. That was my only excitement of the day and was otherwise alone as no students showed up.

The following Monday I was called by the Headmaster to come back to the school after I finished with my grocery store hours. When I arrived he explained to me that he had decided to change the alarm code the previous Friday evening and had forgotten that I needed to know it. He had once again reset the code and he told me what it now was... And he then disappeared a few of days later. After the first days passed, the office staff called the out-of-state owner of the Business College about it and they sent someone to temporarily head the place. From that out of state office, they were able to provide the home address of the Headmaster and some of the office staff went there to find no answer at the door. Only when the temporary guy arrived were the police contacted and a 'wellness check' performed, with the police breaking down the door of the Headmaster's house to find that he had been on a full drunk bender for the week and the out-of-state owner decided to permanently replace him by September.

My Saturdays were back to being what they were. By this point the Business College had discontinued daytime computer classes after discontinuing the nighttime ones the year prior. Now the only use for the TI-990 was for the 'Computerized Accounting' courses still held and given that I'd coded-up a great new interface for that the previous winter, there was no need for those students to come in on Saturdays and catch-up. I started to bring in my Dungeons & Dragons books and formulate my next games for the Friday evening group. I had continued to try and recapture the great D&D feeling from my final high school year once I had moved to Colorado and my most recent attempt was a Friday evening group, the one evening I didn't have classes to be at. I had rounded-up about four people to play, but it was limping along and soon one of the four left...

Even though there were no students coming into the school to use the computer, some still arrived to drop-off necessary paperwork at the office or to pick up blank forms. But this just made for brief greetings as they were soon gone, if I heard them at all while in the computer room. I was called in by the new Headmistress of the school the Monday after one Fall weekend and when I arrived I was chewed-out because a keyboard in one of the rooms at the far end of the building had been broken. At my blank expression the Headmistress explained that it must have happened during Saturday as those using the room hadn't noticed it broken before the weekend and what did I know about it? Nothing. She felt I should be held responsible for it but I pointed out that, while I did roam the building a couple of times during my Saturdays, that my assigned place was the computer room and my job to monitor it, not the other rooms. As the broken keyboard was at the other end of the building I didn't see what I could have done about it. This lead to some grumpy considerations during the week and then I was told that I was to now check the halls first thing Saturday morning to make sure all the other doors were closed & locked. I agreed.

By the end of the fall quarter, they decided to skip having 'Computerized Accounting' for the coming winter quarter and I decided I wasn't really needed anymore. Over the course of the year, despite getting my headaches under control, I had continued to lose more weight and finally even my stamina was giving out; I could use another true day off just to rest-up for my night classes and effectively full-time grocery store job. I went to the Headmistress to let her know that I'd be leaving with the end of the year, that I'd spend my last weekend ensuring the system could run fine without me and recommended that they have one of the accredited college computer monitors come by from time to time to perform backups and be on call if other problems arose. But if needed, I'd always be happy to come in if a problem came up and they couldn't get someone else.

She accepted this and, frankly, I doubt she had seen much reason for having the campus open on the weekends at all once she had taken over. After my last weekend, I turned in my keys the following Monday and took one last walk through the building, partially filled with its daytime students, and reflected on my having started here as a student three years earlier, and this being my first regular job in Colorado since I had moved here. Where once I thought I had no chance of a post high school degree, this College had told me otherwise and provided me a glimpse of my future.

I left, never to hear from them again and never returning on my own.

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Explosion

31

In the early Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Six, I got home from my Saturday Computer Room Monitoring & Tutoring job and ordered a pizza with a bottle of soda as I settled down to watch evening shows. When they arrived I ate and, about a half hour later, my head exploded in pain.

Soon after I'd gotten to Colorado, I'd started to have sudden onset headaches. They would start out of the blue and throb for the next few hours until finally fading away. Yet, as headaches are deemed common place for people, according to frequent ads for over the counter medication to treat them, it never occurred to me to see a doctor for them and I just endured it unless I had the chance to take an aspirin. As I would come to fully understand later in life, one should only treat the symptom while still addressing the cause. All too often in life we treat the symptom but don't worry about the cause, even if it's ever worsening. Like the leak in the roof, putting a bucket underneath it doesn't fix the leak, it just addresses the obvious sign of the problem while the cause continues to fester.

For just shy of three years since I'd moved to Colorado, I'd been getting these sudden onset headaches and just addressing the pain and never wondering about what triggered it. But this time, the throbbing pain in my head was so intense I was sure it was going to pop and leave my brains splattered all around. So I decided to go to the emergency room.

Once there, they saw me quickly and when I told them of the pain and intense pulsing, they checked my blood pressure and were disturbed by the result, with the high-end above one seventy. They decided they should check the pressure in all of my limbs: The other arm and both legs. The results were pretty similar although growing with each check, with the last limb the high number had made it to one eighty. I don't remember if they gave me anything for it, or just observed me for a couple of hours rechecking my pressure, but the doctor did come in and ask if I had recently eaten anything. I'd mentioned the pizza & soda and he asked me if I had a history of having these sudden onset headaches after having one or both of theses. Thinking back, this was when I realized that these headaches most often happened after having a soda and I told him so. He asked if I'd had that problem all my life and I told him I hadn't, only in recent years. He suspected that the industry change from sugar to corn sweetener was triggering my problem and recommended I try drinking diet soda, or first check the label and make sure I got one of the few brands still using sugar and see if that put an end to my sudden headaches. If not, then I should have a follow-up appointment with my doctor about addressing my blood pressure spikes. I remained at the emergency room for a while longer as I considered this and the subsequent checks of my blood pressure found it moving back down into the normal range. I was released to go back home.

I started checking bottles at work and at stores: Sure enough most of the major brands of soda were now all corn syrup based. I checked the diet sodas and at the time saccharin was the gold standard for them, with a nice little health warning printed on the cap of each bottle. I started with the diet versions of the sodas I liked and the headaches didn't come back. For the the first time in quite a while I was headache free for months on end.

Unfortunately it didn't make my joint pains any better, though they hadn't gotten worse either, they just persisted at the same level. Since being bizarrely dumped by the joint specialist doctor I hadn't seen anyone about them as, by this point, I had endured the aches in my knuckles and knees for a year and a half. After the emergency room visit, I did make a follow-up visit with my mother's primary doctor and when I saw him and reported that the headaches had not returned, and my blood pressure level was normal at the office, he decided we didn't need to worry about ongoing blood pressure issues. He asked if there was anything else he could help me with and I mentioned the ever persistent joint pains that the specialist hadn't been able to help with and jaw-droppingly enough he told me those would likely go away once I found myself a girl friend...

I had no idea what to make of that, at the time, but with subsequent years of reflection I realized by having the same primary doctor as my mother, it was likely the case of her saying things like this about me to him and then he recycling them as his own thoughts when seeing me. As the next year and a half came I would fully come to realize the devastating effect this feedback loop from my mother would have on my health.

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Computers, Computers

30

Even with having two jobs at the time, the entry price of an IBM PC was still beyond my grasp and I continued to use my TRS-80 for four and a half years since I'd bought it. I had reached the end as far as updating it as well; while there were other options such as buying a third party color display interface for it, it had never been adopted as a common place add-on and thus there was no software that used it beyond what the third party company had come up with. After his first year with his IBM PC, my friend Jeff liked it so much he decided to get himself a second one... Sort of.

His own TRS-80 had become relegated to a forgotten room to run his online site as he had otherwise lost interest in it, and when it came time for his second IBM PC-ish computer, he decided to give one of the 'clones' a try. One of the greatest expenses for an IBM PC was the ROM BIOS. The Read-Only Memory Basic Input/Output System was embedded code that a computer started with when turned on. I'll say it's kind of like the computer's DNA that gets the computer going from scratch and provides a minimum library of software routines it can call to read the keyboard, display a letter on the screen, initially access external storage devices such as a disk drive, etc. While many IBM PC work-alike computers had come up with their own ROM BIOS to be the core of their machines, they didn't match the IBM PC version closely enough and often software written for the PC wouldn't run on the work-alikes. A clone manufacturer could always buy the IBM PC ROM BIOS to put into their computer thus guaranteeing they'd be one hundred percent compatible, but the license fee IBM charged for that ensured the cost of the clone computers would be as high as their own prices for a PC, thus any clone computer couldn't compete.

The Phoenix Technologies company came up with a novel approach to address this problem. Have you heard the joke that if you get enough monkeys locked into a room with typewriters they will eventually type-up Hamlet by accident? Phoenix came up with the idea of finding a group of computer coders who had no experience with the IBM PC and told them to create a ROM BIOS for them. They then told them what point of memory each BIOS routine would have to be placed into and what that routine did, but left it up to the coders to determine how to make it fit and work in that bit of memory from scratch. With this technique, Phoenix had a ROM BIOS created that was a perfect work-alike of the IBM PC's ROM BIOS with a legally verifiable story that any coding similarity between their ROMs was a coincidence as the people who created theirs had, provably, never seen IBM's code. Thus perfect IBM PC clones could be cranked-out at a significantly lower price.

Jeff decided that he would test this out for himself and bought his second IBM PC as a Phoenix ROM based clone that we assembled from various chosen parts. While he could have mail ordered all of these parts himself, he had a friend who had already become versed in doing this and was rapidly turning this familiarity into a small business out of his home. Jeff took me on his trip there and picked out his case, motherboard, various interface cards and storage hardware and assembled them into a working machine while we were there. His friend then added up the cost for all the parts Jeff had chosen, added a little bit on top for himself, and Jeff went home with an IBM PC clone for effectively half the price of buying a new IBM PC, itself. Jeff plopped this computer on the same table right next to his IBM PC and then spent the next month and more trying all of his PC software on the clone side-by-side to find something that didn't work. I was often in the seat next to him as we did this and we couldn't find anything that tripped-up the clone... that we cared about. I think one exception was the IBM PC diagnostic software which noticed the clone's Phoenix Technologies ROM didn't perfectly match the IBM image and thus assumed it was corrupt. But as all other programs were fooled, who cared what the IBM diagnostic software thought of it?

After two months of hands-on experience with this clone at Jeff's house I realized, with the vastly lower price, I could finally enter the IBM PC world at home and soon made an appointment at the friend's house to assemble and buy my own clone. This time Jeff joined me and helped me select a handful of improved items, such as a flip-top case for my version of the clone, and I was on my way home and raring to go. My TRS-80 computer was packed away into its Radio Shack made luggage cases and stacked in a corner of my bedroom and my PC clone put in its place on top of my custom made computer desk. While the desk had holes for the TRS-80 components to slip into, the clone's case and keyboard were bigger and just sat over the spots where the holes were, hiding them nicely while not falling in. I was into the modern computer world once again... Which as I was starting to learn, meant I'd be outdated by the end of the decade. By the mid-nineteen nineties, people's computer purchases were outdated by the end of each year, and by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, people's computer purchases were outdated by the end of each month. Today, whatever you see on the shelf is already outdated and you just decide to accept it. Or you make the mistake of buying some cutting-edge technology through the mail and it's outdated as it arrives at your door step.

One thing I didn't have to worry about becoming outdated in Nineteen Eighty-Six was the computer at my new accredited College. They had a fully fledged version of the TI-990 minicomputer that my Business College had and these computers, products of the nineteen seventies, had long since been outdated: That's how the colleges had gotten them so cheaply. This new College equally had more computer languages to master that were also outdated as I'd come to learn and one of them was RPG II. Report Program Generator, mark 2, it was a language so limited that all you could really do with it was read existing data on a computer and chose a format to output it in, most often to a printer. The Final for the class was to, you guessed it, read a file of existing data and print it out in two different formats. The teacher told us we'd have to create two different programs for this as he wanted one format to be a full listing of the data, and the second format to be a summary. Being the annoying computer smart ass that I was, I realized I could do it in one RPG II program given my now year & a half of direct experience using and running the TI-990 system at the Business College. Still, as the teacher had told us we'd need to write two programs, I didn't want to turn in a single program for the Final and get dinged for only doing half the coding, even if it did everything the teacher had wanted. So at the end of the class, I went up to him and asked if I could go ahead and do it as one RPG program. He assured me I couldn't. I said, ''Yes, but if I could write a single RPG program that could do it, would that be allowed for my Final?'' He had enough experience with me to get that twinkle in his eye as he realized that, if anyone could pull that rabbit out of a hat, I could. Yes, he said he'd like to see that if I could figure out how to.

RPG II allowed you to take the same data and output it as two different files, so if the school had two printers, I could write one program that would print the data in different formats to two different printers at the same time, yet the school only had the one printer. But I had become familiar with how the TI-990 accessed its printer and there were two ways. The most common way was the 'spool', essentially a method where things intended for the printer were written to the harddrive and then printed-up the next time the printer was free. But I knew you could also address the printer directly, which caused your program to wait until the printer was free, then run and directly use the printer until it was done. My solution for the Final was to have one output file go directly to the printer while the other one went to the spool. Thus the program waited until the printer was free, printed the full data to the printer directly while spooling the summary. Once the full listing was done, the spool noticed the printer was free and popped-out the summary print-out immediately afterward. The teacher was very impressed and gave me top marks!

Unfortunately I wasn't able to capitalize on this with a future computer class or job opportunity with him as my days at the College were rapidly coming to an unexpected end...

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