Bob Bockholt

Bob Bockholt, he's just this guy, you know?

Description:

Old, bald, dumpy, scruffy programmer type with 25 years before the mast (keyboard + monitor), and I still LOVE doing this stuff.

I have lived in Orem, Utah USA for almost 20 years. My wife, Glynneth, and I have three boys, now young men or, in two cases, Marines. (i.e. dangerous young men.) Currently, I help my wife with raising two miniature American Eskimo dogs.

Goals in Wiki:

Learn when to omit the article before wiki. [Sometimes - see WikiHasManyMeanings for the full scoop.]

Become at least as famous as RonJeffries, but not as well known as Robert Abitbol. The first is one of the compelling goals, not the kind you actually achieve. The second goal is a reminder to be a GoodWikiCitizen and not to stir things that don't stink.

Produce a page or two that really contribute to the goals of wiki. ProgrammingAsLifestyle, will not be one of them, and ReadingCode won't be either. But ProgrammersBlock is at least something more than nothing.

Flames, compliments, flattery may be given to my bbockholt Yahoo! account or put in the space provided below. Just be sure to put 'wiki' in the subject line as I delete all mail from persons and domains unknown.

On DanBarlow's page I found the following text: I (often) sign my contributions. This is to declare culpability, not to claim immutability. Edit what you want to edit, remove my signature if it's no longer appropriate.

Well, I sign my pages for a different reason: So everyone can avoid stepping in it.

kEwL man... how about a little history of those 25 years for us young ones! -- Unknown

Life Story:

Ok, boys and girls, gather 'round 'ol Bob and listen to tales of computing dinosaurs that roamed the Earth in the times before the Internet...

I had your typical Boomer childhood without computers - mainframes were not common in most homes of the time. But an interest in computers was vaguely present because my dad was a Systems Analyst and gave me his broken IBM flow chart templates to play with. (Okay, 'gave' might be the wrong word here, because they weren't broken before I got to them.)

At some point in high school, a friend took me to the local college where there was access to a mainframe running BASIC. We played Star Trek on IBM Selectric terminals and it was great fun. He showed me how to write a little program that counted to ten. Whee! (Sarcasm)

Later, a neighbor bought an Altair system, with an ASR33 teletype terminal. We played HuntTheWumpus He wrote a program that asked my name and then printed out "Hi, Bob!". Whee! (Sarcasm) At least I could watch the blinking lights.

But shortly after finishing high school there was a fatal encounter with an early HP programmable calculator and that was the beginning of the end of Life As We Knew It.

The calculator belonged to a friend, who let me borrow it on account of my drooling all over it when he showed it to me. This beast was an HP 110, with a four deep stack, seven memory locations, and fifty program steps and red, glowing digits. My buddy had the manual which contained example programs. I crunched through a couple of those, but found myself unable to resist making 'improvements'. (Later I learned this was called 'code maintenance' or, less lovingly, 'feature creep'.) I even managed to code up some of my own programs, the best of which was a tic-tac-toe game, which I thought was pretty clever because you needed nine memories, but there were only seven.

This all happened in Brasil (or Brazil to non-natives) while serving a two year mission for my church, which meant I had other things to do besides inventing a seven cell spreadsheet program. When I returned home things had changed drastically. Microcomputers (this was before personal computers) were all the rage.

To be continued...

Abitbol is mentioned above in my Goals section because I'm new to wiki and saw that he featured prominently on the WikiTroublemakers? list. My working hypothesis is that he plays opinionated and confrontational because he thinks there is another stable state for wiki that is higher in energy, and by adding some you can get the rest to get off their rumps to go there. Alternately, maybe he justs find the whole thing silly or frustrating. Anyway, I've got to go - it's time for my chiuaua's group therapy. (That rotweiller makes me nervous!) Tchau!

WikiMailBox

Yeah, as if!

It's all right - you're not a MugWump?. Honest, really!

Bob, I made a new addition to the CoRoutine page you may find of some interest; it's a small "killer app" for coroutines that finally shows a real problem that is difficult to solve as well any other way. -- DougMerritt

Bob, I deleted your comment on ProgrammableCalculators claiming that SlideRules were off-topic on this wiki. Nope. I DisagreedByDeleting [DisagreeByDeleting]. :-) No problem. -- DavidCary

CategoryHomePage