I learned to program because of United Airlines. Yup, that’s right. Not because I worked for them or anything like that. In fact, this happened long before the Web, personal computers, any of this fun stuff that has so transformed our daily lives (mine perhaps more than others). United probably had programmers writing in COBOL or something horrid like that, which I have never (thankfully) touched.
No, I learned to program because United used to have a little contest on flights to Hawaii. They took guesses on when the plane would reach the halfway mark to Oahu. I think they still do, but back when the incident-that-led-to-a-life-of-hackery occurred, they used to award prizes. Remember the day companies would do little stuff like that? Even though it cost them a few bucks? You know, when life was a little more human?
So on some trip back, I tried my hand at calculating a guess. I remember the pilot saying something about how you had to adjust for temperature. Something about extra time for every degree below -54F. Which doesn’t make much sense (yes, it will affect the drag, but if they tell you the airspeed then…?). And what do you know, I won. I’m not sure what this says about me: I remember the prize, but I couldn’t tell you where I was flying from for the life of me. The prize was this nifty little kit full of Old Spice products. I think there was some cologne and a tiny bar of soap. All packed up in a little box. Too cool.
I think this was when I was in seventh grade. Not sure, but that seems right. So I was probably around twelve or thirteen. I liked my little Old Spice kit. Old Spice will always hold a special place in my heart (if not actually on my body). I don’t know when my dad bought the calculator, or when I first started playing with it, or how/when I found out you could _program_ it. I can’t say I did it to win another prize (since, after all, it was unlikely I would have the calculator with me on the next flight). But I became fascinated with programming the little beast to figure out the flight time for me (including adjusting for the air temperature the way the pilot said I should).
I have little formal training as a programmer. I’m what you might call the old-school hacker type. I’ve always done it because it interests me. But who knows what would have happened if United hadn’t given out those prizes oh-so long ago. I might not be running my own server, or writing this blog. (Believe it or not, I’ve been running a web server for, um, ah, I forget. Let’s just say I built my first GNU/Linux box sometime in 1994. Thanks for the help, David.)
I’m not really a big believer in blogging. Something you might guess from comparing the date of this writing with the aforementioned milestones. But I keep coming up with tidbits of things that I think might help someone, somewhere in the world. So, I’ll try to write some of them down. And maybe some other stuff too.