Anecdote

You probably don’t know the Red Baron Operating System, “R-Boss” (RBOS). It was named for a strip bar in Houston Texas and it carried billions, probably trillions, of dollars of credit card authorizations for American Express – including long after they lost the source code for it.

Back when 300 baud dial-up was new – yeah, that’s a long time ago, all right – we had a “guest” login to a mainframe where a friend worked. He had administrative privileges and, being the generous sort, we were “in”.

I was a terrible student.

I rarely did homework but somehow slid by with Cs and just barely advanced from grade to grade. What homework I did was driven solely by fear of a teacher’s wrath but, over time, my skin grew thicker with each passing year. “Homework time” was spent alone in my room with doors shut as I worked on hobbies or reading Science Fiction.

On Saturdays, Dad would sometimes go to the hospital to see a couple of his patients. And sometimes he would take me along.

East encompassed kindergarten through senior high school. The elementary, East Elementary School, had the right half of the building while the high schools, junior and senior collectively referred to as East High School, had the left. I started there with kindergarten and attended for twelve years but at the end of my eleventh grade it was clear that something had to change. My grades were dismal and only with summer school was I advanced to the twelfth.

The near-wealthy lived in Chickasaw Gardens just a few blocks from Picardy.

And so begins another relay.

My first programming job was for the American Express Space Bank at the end of the 1960s. “Space Bank” was a relatively short-lived hotel and motel reservation system run by the credit card people.