In November of 1977, I was working for Olivetti selling typewriters and calculators when the company closed its Albuquerque branch. Floyd Vaulner, the branch manager, got the Oklahoma City Branch, of which the Tulsa Office was a satellite. Floyd kindly took me with him, installing me in Tulsa. Olivetti back then was making some of the world's first desktop computers, and didn't object when I began to sell them. Probably I would have spent the rest of my life there, but I started programming the things, an activity to which I became hopelessly addicted almost at once. It quickly became clear that I was going to have to continue as a salesman or become a programmer, because I surely couldn't do both.

Thus it was that I matriculated at Tulsa Junior College, which at the time was the best place in the known universe to get into anything related to computers. I got out in 1980, just before the first IBM PCs came out (I have frequently asserted that we were happier when we had CP/M -- And we were better people). I started at TG&Y as a 3650 POS assembler programmer that June.

I was gratified to discover that I had just about the ideal education for this: I never mastered physics, but I did learn how to solve the kind of problems one encounters all the time as a programmer. Also, although it's true that I don't know as much physics as the average physics minor, I know considerably more physics than the average English major. I got a minor in math, probably couldn't make a living as a mathematician anywhere, but I know what a relational database is -- heck, I know what a relation is, which is more than 99% of all database guys know. As my programming career progressed, it bore in on me that programming languages are languages. They follow the same rules of composition, grammar, syntax and style that spoken languages do, making my training in English composition and linguistics invaluable. Moreover, I learned as a graduate English student how to do research. When the Internet finally blossomed