Education

Here is the entirety of my formal information technology education.

I passed two programming courses at Duke University:

• The first one was Pascal, taught with a mainframe using punchcards, circa 1977.
• The second one was also at Duke, circa 1983: FORTRAN, taught on original IBM PCs (floppy disks, no hard drive) -- for some reason running UCSD P-System instead of DOS. It was so slow that I took my homework to the computer store where I was working at the time and used Digital Research's FORTRAN-77 compiler, running on DOS, in order to get it done.

I also passed a digital circuit design course at Brown University, which I took as part of my work in the Psychology Department. The course was paid for by my employer, who needed me to construct a circuit for digitally recording the timing of a person's finger tapping on a metal plate. (After completing the course, I constructed the circuit and wrote the software to acquire and analyze the data.)

I was a student at two different colleges – Guilford College and Duke University – but neither one was offering computing courses that were at all current compared to what I was learning in the workplace; this fact was a major contributor to my decision to join the full-time workforce in 1985 without having acquired a degree. Why pay to learn about something when you can get paid to learn it?