Author: admin

  • Indonesian Church and Life

    Indonesians and Other Foreign Students During my time at Fresno State as an undergraduate in Math, I made friends with many Iranian students in the Engineering Department. While working at Fresno State, I overheard some students talking and wondered what language they were speaking. At first, I thought it might be Japanese, but it turned…

  • Fresno State Computer Science

    Fresno State Computer Science

    “Ok, Dan. Here’s the VAX. It’s a VAX 11/730. It has 1 Megabyte of memory and 110 Megabytes of disk. Two days of the week, it runs VMS and two days it runs VMS, and the rest is up to you.” “Here are the 9-track tapes. This one is for the VMS environment. This one…

  • Substitute Teaching System

    Substitute Teaching System

    In the early 1980s, a job opened up at Fresno Unified School District’s Data Processing Center. I had no practical experience programming IBM mainframes in Fortran, COBOL, Assembler or JCL, but since they provided training, I applied. The Aptitude Test The manager, Bob Michellini, required applicants to take an aptitude test focused on logical and…

  • Automobile Finance System

    Automobile Finance System

    Bill Putnam and Bill Pardini had a company called Data Consultants, Inc. And they wanted to create an Automobile Finance System. This small company produced software in a few variants of Basic as many small companies did in the 1970s. In walks this kid (me). Perhaps 19 or 20. Wet behind the ears. No computer…