In a 2014 TimesDaily
Religion Forum discussion titled "Let's Talk About It"
- a Forum Friend, who tells us he is a Christian believer,
yet attacks everything I write about God's Word and the
Christian faith - shared his opinion of me with folks on
the Religion Forum:
That tirade was prompted by the Religion Forum discussion above, "Let's Talk About It" - which was begun by another Forum Friend who questions whether I even know how to use a computer or not.
For the past month or so, on the Religion Forum, a small group of Religion Forum Friends I lovingly call the "Malcontent Cabal" have been accusing me (their reactions to the fact that I have been limited in responding to their urgently felt comments and questions) of using the fact that my Windows 7 computer crashed and I have had to reconstruct my ministry files on an older, slower computer as an excuse.
They tell folks on the Religion Forum that I am using my computer failure, even questioning if it really happened - as an excuse to avoid answering their questions or responding to their accusations. Since all of this has been transpiring on the Religion Forum - it seems appropriate that I post my response to their accusations on the Religion Forum.
So, just for the record, responding to their Religion Forum posts, I have written the post below titled: "Bill Gray, This Is Your Life!" - which shares the ups and downs of my near fifty year career in the computer industry.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fresh out of the Air Force, I joined Burroughs Corporation in August 1958 as a Computer Systems Technician at their plant in Pasadena (Sierra Madre), California. A year later, in 1959, I transferred into the company's Field Engineering department and was assigned to help maintain the Burroughs B220 computer system at the Naval Supply Depot in Norfolk, Virginia.
Nine months later, I was transferred to the Burroughs office in Washington DC - where I was lead Field Engineer on their system at Atlantic Research Corporation in Virginia. Later, I was assigned to test and then install a Burroughs 220 computer which was part of much larger Melpar Corporation system installed at the Air Force SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.
A few years later, I was recruited from Burroughs by the man, Chuck Hill, who had been my Washington DC Regional Manager. By the way, he was also the same man who, in 1958, hired me to work in the Computer System Test department in Pasadena. He was hired away from Burroughs to establish a Test Department for Ramo-Wooldridge (later TRW) in Canoga Park, California, and asked me to join him in that endeavor. Ramo-Wooldridge designed the first military spec minicomputer, the AN/UYK-1 - and our job was to create a test department for that computer. Later, I wrote the AN/UYK-1 Test Manual to guide new hire test technicians as we expanded the department.
After helping establish the Test Department for the AN/UYK-1 at Ramo-Wooldridge, I moved into their Military Support/Field Engineering department. After that transition, I traveled to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard where I installed an AN/UYK-1 computer onboard the USNS Kingsport where it functioned as the antennae control computer. This was the ship which controlled the Syncom satellite that allowed President Kennedy to make the first satellite based telephone call between two continents.
While working in the Military Support/Field Engineering department at Ramo-Wooldridge, I was asked to help the Training Department. Each month I would spend two weeks teaching classes on the AN/UYK-1 computer system to engineers and technicians sent for training by client companies. The rest of the month I would visit customer sites to install new computers or repair existing installations.
A few years later, I left Ramo-Wooldridge and joined Scientific Data Systems where I was a member of their initial corps of senior Field Engineers. I installed the first SDS-930 computer system at MIT Lincoln Labs near Boston; then I traveled to Boeing in Seattle where I installed the second SDS-930 computer as part of a larger Boeing designed and implemented Space-Flight Simulator (Astronaut Reentry Training Simulator System) - which trained astronauts for reentry during their flights, one of the most critical and dangerous times in the entire mission. I was honored to be there the day the first group of astronauts arrived for training.
Later, North American Rockwell-Downey was using a larger SDS-9300 computer system as part of their Space Capsule Simulation System. When the local SDS Field Engineers could not get the system to operate as it was supposed to, I was sent to the site to correct the problem. I designed a temporary fix to make their computer function as they wanted. And my temporary fix was still in that system when I visited the site several years later. Why fool with success?
After a period of time working as a Special Systems Engineer at SDS, I found that I was being asked to visit and repair systems at customers' site which the local Field Engineers should have been able to diagnose and repair. I asked our department manager to allow me to set up a special intensive training class designed to help the Field Engineers learn techniques for trouble-shooting the SDS-930 and SDS-9300 computer systems. He arranged to have half our Field Engineers in the first one week class, then the other half in for the second one week class. For the second class, the head of the SDS Training department asked if he could have his instructors and several visiting customer engineers sit in during the class.
In the mid-1960s, as a Field Engineer/Special Systems Engineer for SDS, I spent time at UC Berkeley where I worked with the Project Genie team headed by Professor Wayne Lichtenberger, given an ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) grant to develop a time sharing computer, and Melvin Pirtle (who later became Dr. Mel Pirtle, Director of NASA Ames Research Center, and who also married our SDS Palo Alto office secretary).
My task was to modify the SDS-930 computer by adding more memory hardware to the system. Point of interest: ARPAnet, developed by the Department of Defense in conjunction with several universities, was the precursor of the Internet we use today.
Project Genie was an ARPA funded computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early time-sharing system based upon the SDS-930 computer and the Berkeley Timesharing System software (the pioneering time-sharing operating system), which was then commercialized as the SDS-940. The system that Scientific Data Systems (SDS) would call the SDS-940 was created by modifying an SDS-930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. And, implementing those hardware modification designs for the Project Genie team at UC Berkeley was my task.
A few years later, Dr. Lichtenberger and the modified computer system now called the SDS-940 moved to the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawaii to work on another ARPA project. By then I was in sales for Digital Equipment and made a sales call at the University of Hawaii. I was able to visit with him and my SDS-940 computer system on the Hawaii campus. It was like running into old friends.
Once the system had been developed at UC Berkeley, SDS began building and selling SDS-940 Timesharing computer systems. I installed the first SDS-940 system at a newly formed company named Tymshare Corporation in Cupertino, California. The company, founded by Tom O’Rourke and Dave Schmidt, was the first to offer commercial timesharing computer services.
During my 12 years as a Field Engineer/Special Systems Engineer - I worked with a number of distinguished and very interesting customers, systems, and applications all over the country.
My engineering and technical knowledge was a big asset when I transitioned into sales and marketing. Those were the days when we traveled to prospective client sites, sat down with client engineers to better understand their needs, and helped them configure systems to meet their requirements.
Those applications ranged from Mission Planning and Defense, to Simulators, to Ocean Surveillance, Computer Aided Design, Animation, Geophysical and Chemical Data Analysis, Process Control, and many more very interesting applications. That was the excitement of being a Sales Engineer in those days - we got involved in and gained knowledge (jack of all trades/master of none) in many different areas of science, engineering, manufacturing, and education.
However, my Forum Friend is right about the computer industry's, and customer's, view of Computer Sales people today. Most sales today are done over the telephone or in computer stores - where intimacy with client needs and applications is rarely experienced. Many telephone sales people today are merely warm bodies who have been taught a few technical words, given a script of questions to ask, and placed in a cubicle with a telephone. When the computer industry transitioned to that level, that is when I lost interest and, praise God, that is when God gave me a writing ministry to keep me focused on Him.
My first job in Sales was with Digital Equipment Corporation. I began as a Sales Application Engineer. In that position I would help customers apply our computer products to their applications. I recall getting a phone call from a gentleman in a small company in Nevada. He wanted to configure an interface to connect a DEC PDP-8s computer to a television screen for a game he was designing. I was able to design and configure that interface for him using DEC Logic Modules. The small company was Atari and the game was Pong. The rest, as they say, is history.
Later, at DEC, I designed a Stimulation/Response system, using a DEC PDP-8s computer and DEC Logic Modules, for the Psychology department at Stanford Research Institute which allowed them to apply different stimuli to lab rats to train them for specific responses.
At the same time, I was also giving one day Logic Seminars for DEC clients and prospective clients - teaching them to use DEC computer logic modules to implement special systems for their own needs. The first seminar I gave was at the University of Cal, Berkeley - where 80% of the attendees were Ph.d's from the university faculty and staff, and from Lawrence Berkeley Atomic Energy Lab. That first full day seminar was my baptism under fire in presenting Computer Seminars - and with that level of attendees, the baptismal water, at times, got a wee bit warm.
Then, I went into full time sales as a Sales Engineer. During my years in sales for DEC - in Northern California and in their Huntsville office - I continued to give Computer and Computer Logic Seminars for customers and wanna-be customers.
In 1968, I worked with Judith Edwards, director of a government funded education program formed to put computers into local blue-collar middle schools in Oregon. This program was to address the social/societal aspect of the coming computer society, rather than the more accepted academic function.
It was a program aimed at children from blue collar homes who were more likely to go into vocational training rather than college - to take the mystery out of computers and help them better understand how computers would impact their lives in the future. We installed a group of DEC PDP-8s computers in Elementary School classrooms and allowed the children to get hands-on experience using a computer.
Fast forward a number of years - and I joined a small company based in Albuquerque named MITS. The company had just introduced a kit-form "build it yourself" microcomputer called the Altair.
My task there was to establish a network of independent sales offices (manufacturer's rep companies) to sell our Altair product - and to travel around giving Microcomputer Seminars. At that time, there was only one computer store in all of America. It was a store-front computer store in Los Angeles owned by a man and wife team.
A MITS Microcomputer Seminar I gave at the Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, California, was so successful that a gentleman named Paul Terrell met with me that evening and agreed to represent our company in Northern California. A month later, he opened the first Byte Shop computer store (the second computer store in America) in Mountain View, California.
Then, with his brother he opened another store in Palo Alto - and then with a second brother he opened a third store in Oregon. That grew into the first computer store chain, also called the Byte Shop. Some years later other computer store chains were begun - and Paul sold his chain, now 250 stores, to another chain and retired, young.
By the way, when I was at MITS, there were two young computer programmers who comprised the company's programming staff. Their names are Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They left MITS and started a new company. You may have heard of it. They named it Microsoft. That was in the mid 1970s.
Fast forward about ten years and I was hired as Regional Manager for Ferranti International Controls Corporation, a Houston based subsidiary of the larger Ferranti International PLC of Manchester, England. The company, Ferranti, a large user of computer graphics terminals and systems, hired me because they wanted to develop their own computer graphics manufacturing capability. But, because they did not want to limit the market for this new computer graphics product to just Ferranti companies - they asked me to do a rather extensive market survey across America to determine what kind of computer graphics product the U.S. market wanted.
I spent three months traveling around America meeting with and interviewing top level Engineering people, typically VP Engineering and Engineering Management level. I did this with small, medium sized, and large corporations - and with computer consultants and many government agencies. At the end of my market survey tour, I made several trips with our U.S. senior engineering managers to Ferranti in Manchester, England, and Ferranti in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we spent days bringing them up to speed on what U. S. companies wanted to see in the new Ferranti computer graphics product.
From those meetings in England, a new product was born and the following article in Computer Technology Review, Summer 1986 issue, describes the design philosophy behind it:
So, to my TimesDaily Religion Forum Friend, as you can see I have lived a rather dull, mundane life in the computer industry. But, not too bad for a guy whom you suggested did not even make it out of high school. I am sure that my teachers and classmates, those of my Sheffield High (Alabama) graduating class of 1955, will be disappointed by how, according to you, I have wasted my life.
But, somehow I struggled through, finally leaving my computer industry career behind me, except for using the products - and have spent the past twenty-five plus years, and counting, concentrating on sharing the Word of God with the world, using a computer. My Friend, I pray that I will have many opportunities to share His Word with you over the coming years.
Let me close by saying that even though my TimesDaily Religion Forum Friend was seeking to use his limited knowledge of me and my career in an attempt to cast doubt upon my writings - in a sense he is right. When I entered the computer industry in 1958, after having electronic training and experience in the Air Force - the computer industry was still in its infancy. At that time, a person who was willing to work hard and apply himself, even without college credentials, could rise to the top.
That said, today the computer and electronics industry has so matured that it would be hard to duplicate what we did in the embryonic stages of its growth. Today, regardless of your chosen career field - education is the key to success. Not just the diploma, but the knowledge, wisdom, and maturity you gain in working toward that goal of getting your degree.
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
"The troll (that is me, Bill Gray) was initially in computer sales. And to tell you what the industry thinks of their sales people would take more time than I have. He subtly, and carefully, hints that he worked in Field Service Engineering - attempting to give the impression he was a Field Service Engineer. Anyone experienced in the field knows that the title Field Service Engineer is reserved for those with an engineering degree. There is some question in my mind if he actually graduated from high school. Computer expert indeed!"
That tirade was prompted by the Religion Forum discussion above, "Let's Talk About It" - which was begun by another Forum Friend who questions whether I even know how to use a computer or not.
For the past month or so, on the Religion Forum, a small group of Religion Forum Friends I lovingly call the "Malcontent Cabal" have been accusing me (their reactions to the fact that I have been limited in responding to their urgently felt comments and questions) of using the fact that my Windows 7 computer crashed and I have had to reconstruct my ministry files on an older, slower computer as an excuse.
They tell folks on the Religion Forum that I am using my computer failure, even questioning if it really happened - as an excuse to avoid answering their questions or responding to their accusations. Since all of this has been transpiring on the Religion Forum - it seems appropriate that I post my response to their accusations on the Religion Forum.
So, just for the record, responding to their Religion Forum posts, I have written the post below titled: "Bill Gray, This Is Your Life!" - which shares the ups and downs of my near fifty year career in the computer industry.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fresh out of the Air Force, I joined Burroughs Corporation in August 1958 as a Computer Systems Technician at their plant in Pasadena (Sierra Madre), California. A year later, in 1959, I transferred into the company's Field Engineering department and was assigned to help maintain the Burroughs B220 computer system at the Naval Supply Depot in Norfolk, Virginia.
Nine months later, I was transferred to the Burroughs office in Washington DC - where I was lead Field Engineer on their system at Atlantic Research Corporation in Virginia. Later, I was assigned to test and then install a Burroughs 220 computer which was part of much larger Melpar Corporation system installed at the Air Force SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.
See the related articles:
Strategic Air Command Gets $15-Million Data Processor(Electronic Design, June 21, 1961, p. 34) : http://electronicdesign.com/displays/strategic-air-command-gets-15-million-data-processor
Burroughs 220 Computer System: https://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/folklore/index.php/The_Burroughs_220_Computer
A few years later, I was recruited from Burroughs by the man, Chuck Hill, who had been my Washington DC Regional Manager. By the way, he was also the same man who, in 1958, hired me to work in the Computer System Test department in Pasadena. He was hired away from Burroughs to establish a Test Department for Ramo-Wooldridge (later TRW) in Canoga Park, California, and asked me to join him in that endeavor. Ramo-Wooldridge designed the first military spec minicomputer, the AN/UYK-1 - and our job was to create a test department for that computer. Later, I wrote the AN/UYK-1 Test Manual to guide new hire test technicians as we expanded the department.
After helping establish the Test Department for the AN/UYK-1 at Ramo-Wooldridge, I moved into their Military Support/Field Engineering department. After that transition, I traveled to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard where I installed an AN/UYK-1 computer onboard the USNS Kingsport where it functioned as the antennae control computer. This was the ship which controlled the Syncom satellite that allowed President Kennedy to make the first satellite based telephone call between two continents.
While working in the Military Support/Field Engineering department at Ramo-Wooldridge, I was asked to help the Training Department. Each month I would spend two weeks teaching classes on the AN/UYK-1 computer system to engineers and technicians sent for training by client companies. The rest of the month I would visit customer sites to install new computers or repair existing installations.
A few years later, I left Ramo-Wooldridge and joined Scientific Data Systems where I was a member of their initial corps of senior Field Engineers. I installed the first SDS-930 computer system at MIT Lincoln Labs near Boston; then I traveled to Boeing in Seattle where I installed the second SDS-930 computer as part of a larger Boeing designed and implemented Space-Flight Simulator (Astronaut Reentry Training Simulator System) - which trained astronauts for reentry during their flights, one of the most critical and dangerous times in the entire mission. I was honored to be there the day the first group of astronauts arrived for training.
Later, North American Rockwell-Downey was using a larger SDS-9300 computer system as part of their Space Capsule Simulation System. When the local SDS Field Engineers could not get the system to operate as it was supposed to, I was sent to the site to correct the problem. I designed a temporary fix to make their computer function as they wanted. And my temporary fix was still in that system when I visited the site several years later. Why fool with success?
After a period of time working as a Special Systems Engineer at SDS, I found that I was being asked to visit and repair systems at customers' site which the local Field Engineers should have been able to diagnose and repair. I asked our department manager to allow me to set up a special intensive training class designed to help the Field Engineers learn techniques for trouble-shooting the SDS-930 and SDS-9300 computer systems. He arranged to have half our Field Engineers in the first one week class, then the other half in for the second one week class. For the second class, the head of the SDS Training department asked if he could have his instructors and several visiting customer engineers sit in during the class.
In the mid-1960s, as a Field Engineer/Special Systems Engineer for SDS, I spent time at UC Berkeley where I worked with the Project Genie team headed by Professor Wayne Lichtenberger, given an ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) grant to develop a time sharing computer, and Melvin Pirtle (who later became Dr. Mel Pirtle, Director of NASA Ames Research Center, and who also married our SDS Palo Alto office secretary).
My task was to modify the SDS-930 computer by adding more memory hardware to the system. Point of interest: ARPAnet, developed by the Department of Defense in conjunction with several universities, was the precursor of the Internet we use today.
Project Genie was an ARPA funded computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early time-sharing system based upon the SDS-930 computer and the Berkeley Timesharing System software (the pioneering time-sharing operating system), which was then commercialized as the SDS-940. The system that Scientific Data Systems (SDS) would call the SDS-940 was created by modifying an SDS-930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. And, implementing those hardware modification designs for the Project Genie team at UC Berkeley was my task.
A few years later, Dr. Lichtenberger and the modified computer system now called the SDS-940 moved to the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawaii to work on another ARPA project. By then I was in sales for Digital Equipment and made a sales call at the University of Hawaii. I was able to visit with him and my SDS-940 computer system on the Hawaii campus. It was like running into old friends.
Once the system had been developed at UC Berkeley, SDS began building and selling SDS-940 Timesharing computer systems. I installed the first SDS-940 system at a newly formed company named Tymshare Corporation in Cupertino, California. The company, founded by Tom O’Rourke and Dave Schmidt, was the first to offer commercial timesharing computer services.
During my 12 years as a Field Engineer/Special Systems Engineer - I worked with a number of distinguished and very interesting customers, systems, and applications all over the country.
My engineering and technical knowledge was a big asset when I transitioned into sales and marketing. Those were the days when we traveled to prospective client sites, sat down with client engineers to better understand their needs, and helped them configure systems to meet their requirements.
Those applications ranged from Mission Planning and Defense, to Simulators, to Ocean Surveillance, Computer Aided Design, Animation, Geophysical and Chemical Data Analysis, Process Control, and many more very interesting applications. That was the excitement of being a Sales Engineer in those days - we got involved in and gained knowledge (jack of all trades/master of none) in many different areas of science, engineering, manufacturing, and education.
However, my Forum Friend is right about the computer industry's, and customer's, view of Computer Sales people today. Most sales today are done over the telephone or in computer stores - where intimacy with client needs and applications is rarely experienced. Many telephone sales people today are merely warm bodies who have been taught a few technical words, given a script of questions to ask, and placed in a cubicle with a telephone. When the computer industry transitioned to that level, that is when I lost interest and, praise God, that is when God gave me a writing ministry to keep me focused on Him.
My first job in Sales was with Digital Equipment Corporation. I began as a Sales Application Engineer. In that position I would help customers apply our computer products to their applications. I recall getting a phone call from a gentleman in a small company in Nevada. He wanted to configure an interface to connect a DEC PDP-8s computer to a television screen for a game he was designing. I was able to design and configure that interface for him using DEC Logic Modules. The small company was Atari and the game was Pong. The rest, as they say, is history.
Later, at DEC, I designed a Stimulation/Response system, using a DEC PDP-8s computer and DEC Logic Modules, for the Psychology department at Stanford Research Institute which allowed them to apply different stimuli to lab rats to train them for specific responses.
At the same time, I was also giving one day Logic Seminars for DEC clients and prospective clients - teaching them to use DEC computer logic modules to implement special systems for their own needs. The first seminar I gave was at the University of Cal, Berkeley - where 80% of the attendees were Ph.d's from the university faculty and staff, and from Lawrence Berkeley Atomic Energy Lab. That first full day seminar was my baptism under fire in presenting Computer Seminars - and with that level of attendees, the baptismal water, at times, got a wee bit warm.
Then, I went into full time sales as a Sales Engineer. During my years in sales for DEC - in Northern California and in their Huntsville office - I continued to give Computer and Computer Logic Seminars for customers and wanna-be customers.
In 1968, I worked with Judith Edwards, director of a government funded education program formed to put computers into local blue-collar middle schools in Oregon. This program was to address the social/societal aspect of the coming computer society, rather than the more accepted academic function.
It was a program aimed at children from blue collar homes who were more likely to go into vocational training rather than college - to take the mystery out of computers and help them better understand how computers would impact their lives in the future. We installed a group of DEC PDP-8s computers in Elementary School classrooms and allowed the children to get hands-on experience using a computer.
Fast forward a number of years - and I joined a small company based in Albuquerque named MITS. The company had just introduced a kit-form "build it yourself" microcomputer called the Altair.
My task there was to establish a network of independent sales offices (manufacturer's rep companies) to sell our Altair product - and to travel around giving Microcomputer Seminars. At that time, there was only one computer store in all of America. It was a store-front computer store in Los Angeles owned by a man and wife team.
A MITS Microcomputer Seminar I gave at the Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, California, was so successful that a gentleman named Paul Terrell met with me that evening and agreed to represent our company in Northern California. A month later, he opened the first Byte Shop computer store (the second computer store in America) in Mountain View, California.
Then, with his brother he opened another store in Palo Alto - and then with a second brother he opened a third store in Oregon. That grew into the first computer store chain, also called the Byte Shop. Some years later other computer store chains were begun - and Paul sold his chain, now 250 stores, to another chain and retired, young.
By the way, when I was at MITS, there were two young computer programmers who comprised the company's programming staff. Their names are Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They left MITS and started a new company. You may have heard of it. They named it Microsoft. That was in the mid 1970s.
Fast forward about ten years and I was hired as Regional Manager for Ferranti International Controls Corporation, a Houston based subsidiary of the larger Ferranti International PLC of Manchester, England. The company, Ferranti, a large user of computer graphics terminals and systems, hired me because they wanted to develop their own computer graphics manufacturing capability. But, because they did not want to limit the market for this new computer graphics product to just Ferranti companies - they asked me to do a rather extensive market survey across America to determine what kind of computer graphics product the U.S. market wanted.
I spent three months traveling around America meeting with and interviewing top level Engineering people, typically VP Engineering and Engineering Management level. I did this with small, medium sized, and large corporations - and with computer consultants and many government agencies. At the end of my market survey tour, I made several trips with our U.S. senior engineering managers to Ferranti in Manchester, England, and Ferranti in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we spent days bringing them up to speed on what U. S. companies wanted to see in the new Ferranti computer graphics product.
From those meetings in England, a new product was born and the following article in Computer Technology Review, Summer 1986 issue, describes the design philosophy behind it:
Article: Design Factors Limit 2-D Raster Graphics System Architectures (F. Rodney Belch, Ferranti Computer Systems PLC, and Bill Gray, Ferranti International Controls Corporation)
https://www.facebook.com/notes/bill-gray/article-design-factors-limit-2-d-raster-graphics-system-architectures/806686719377483
So, to my TimesDaily Religion Forum Friend, as you can see I have lived a rather dull, mundane life in the computer industry. But, not too bad for a guy whom you suggested did not even make it out of high school. I am sure that my teachers and classmates, those of my Sheffield High (Alabama) graduating class of 1955, will be disappointed by how, according to you, I have wasted my life.
But, somehow I struggled through, finally leaving my computer industry career behind me, except for using the products - and have spent the past twenty-five plus years, and counting, concentrating on sharing the Word of God with the world, using a computer. My Friend, I pray that I will have many opportunities to share His Word with you over the coming years.
Let me close by saying that even though my TimesDaily Religion Forum Friend was seeking to use his limited knowledge of me and my career in an attempt to cast doubt upon my writings - in a sense he is right. When I entered the computer industry in 1958, after having electronic training and experience in the Air Force - the computer industry was still in its infancy. At that time, a person who was willing to work hard and apply himself, even without college credentials, could rise to the top.
That said, today the computer and electronics industry has so matured that it would be hard to duplicate what we did in the embryonic stages of its growth. Today, regardless of your chosen career field - education is the key to success. Not just the diploma, but the knowledge, wisdom, and maturity you gain in working toward that goal of getting your degree.
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
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