6:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Dave Betker
"Mr Language"
Will be our speaker tonight, he was working with IBM through the birth of personal computers. We have always talked hardware and how to press this button and that, NOW get an idea of what is really happening and what it took to get the computer where they are now. Dave can talk at any level and will try to give you a feel of what has happened to computers in your lifetime.
Mr Betker originally wanted to work in designing medicines, but as faith had it, he was not physically able to work in that field. Since he couldn't do that, he applied for a job at IBM in IBM's home town, Endicott, NY (near where he grew up). At that time there were no courses in computers, so IBM asked him to take their DPAT (Data Processing Aptitude Test) which he passed with the highest score they'd seen to that time so they offered him a job. After 6 months he went to their internal programming school. Since he was already an employee, he was required to get at least an A. Here his career was interrupted, as many of our lives were, by Uncle Sam and the draft. After the vacation in the orient he returned to IBM. During his employment at IBM he programmed everything from the 709 (plugboards), 1130, 1520, 7040's, 7090's S/360's, S/370's, PC's, S/3, S/38, AS400 and even dabbled in PDP11's where he wrote in the original Basic and C. At IBM he wrote in microcode (firmware) language, assembler language for many of the machines (each one different), Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, APL, and many internal languages. He wrote "address assigners", operating systems code and applications. He wrote a simulator to run S/3 & S/38 code on an S/360-370 machine. "What are all these numbers???" His last project was to execute database queries from PC's networked with AS400's. The queries were written in ASCII using SQL constructs which required him to write in seven different languages.
Dave will cover what programming is really like and how it progressed. He will answer all questions from the most basic (puny) to any level you wish.
Bring a friend,
See you there.