By Gail Montgomery, [ home | newsletter | past | join | listserve | shareware | directory | links | md9 ]
— Gail Montgomery
I'm a local boy, born and raised in South Philadelphia. After Central High and West Chester, I served for two years with the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Germany. The next thirty years were spent as an analytical chemist in the pharmaceutical industry. It was here that I was introduced to computers in the early years. The first was an analog computer, a huge box with galvanometers and rheostats on the front panel. As strange as it might look today, it did simplify a series of special calculations. I helped introduce digital computers into the lab, and wrote my first FORTRAN program in 1969. As I sit here and write this piece, looking at a flat panel color display, mouse at the side, I am reminded of how programming was done then, keyed into a Teletype equipped with a papertape puncher. The machine was then put online with an acoustical modem, and the tape run through to the mainframe computer in Michigan, from which we rented time. Editing was done character by character on the keyboard and the process repeated. My work became more involved with automation as the years went on, particularly with Technicon analyzers and the HP Diode Array Spectrophotometer. Later, we moved to our own HP computers and introduced an LIMS system (Laboratory Information Management System) to oversee the entire lab operation. Around this time, my firm decided to downsize and offered me a nice package to retire early. I did some consulting for several years, then got lazy and really retired. When I left the company, I suffered from "lack of keyboard syndrome." A typewriter just wouldn't cure it. So, I started looking around for a personal computer, which was now available at reasonable cost. I bought magazines and went to all the computer stores for demonstrations. I had had no experience with the Mac at all. A demonstration of the Mac with MacWrite and particularly MS Excel convinced me to go to Mac instead of the DOS machines of IBM. There were a couple of other operating systems at the time, but I don't even remember them now. So, I got my MacPlus computer with an external hard drive of 20 megabyte capacity. The hard drive alone cost $1200. About that time I joined PACS. I found that belonging to a user group was extremely helpful, as was attending the annual Macworld Expo. PACS moved around a lot, and then I did, and I found out about MLMUG. One of Mac's greatest early apps was HyperCard. When it was first introduced at Boston the huge room was packed. With each demo of features, the crowds went wild. It was like a football game. We've come along quite a bit since then, with both hardware and software. But I still use HyperCard as my main navigation screen, as well as for many other functions. I guess that's why I haven't migrated to OSX quite yet. In the last few years, I have kept busy as house husband and chief cook and bottle washer. I stay busy at the computer in many ways. I maintain the member database and the web page for the Batona Hiking Club. I also sys-op the computers in my wife Martha's medical office. When Y2K came around, Martha yelled "help", since the DOS system that she had would not deal with new dates. I looked around at the packages available, but none fit her particular needs, and I didn't want to be responsible for a Windows operation. So, I decided to write a program for patient tracking and billing from scratch, using FileMaker Pro. It turned out very well, and still runs on an iMac without crashes. I also like to take photographs, including shots on the trail for the hiking web page. For that, I use a very compact Canon Powershot S110 (2.1 MPX). For other photographs I use a Nikon 5700 (5 MPX, 8x optical zoom). As of late I have gotten away from printing all vacation and family photos, and instead, have gone to making PowerPoint presentations. Most everyone has a computer these days, and even Windows people can view the presentation with a reader alone. Manipulating the pictures in Photoshop is a lot easier thanks to a second monitor for the palettes etc. And the Griffin PowerMate is quite handy to do all the resizing. One of these days I'll have to give in and update the OS. Maybe OSXI? — Bob Leonetti
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