I turned 21 in 1959. In truth, the computers at that time were not very impressive. I used computers from that time forward.My first use of a computer was in my checking account at the Bank of America in San Francisco. I was issued checks with electronic readable numbers on the bottom line that were processed by the first commercial computer called ERMA made by General Electric.
I joined the bank in 1964 as one of the first two market research analysts in American banking. My first computer project was with a bank economist (I forget his name). We jointly created a 50- line equation to model the U.S. economy. Each line was put in the computer on punch cards and the data for 50 quarters was input the same way. We ran the cards on an IBM 360 machine for projections for 8 quarters into 1966. We also tested the projections by going back to the early 1958-59 period. The projections for the earlier periods were way off as were the future projections. From that time until today, economic forecasting models have been nearly useless. The same is even more true of global weather prediction models which are covered in many of my last few thousand blogs.
My next computer project at the bank was to input two eq
uations and data from several thousand Bankamericard (now called Visa) applications where we knew the outcome; either good payment history for one equation or bad payment history for the other. Still punch card input into the IBM 360. The result was the discovery that credit card applications could reliably predict bad debt outcomes. I used this to create a credit score for each new application, which was used by the Bankamericard departent from that time forward. This was certainly one of the earliest credit scoring systems in business but I make no claim to inventing it. We never publicized what Bankamericard was doing: wisely. I remember that not filling out the space for a phone number was one of the best predictors of credit outcome; bad.
One of my goals for marketing research was to find a way to synthesize a single account for each customer. Some customers had multiple accounts including personal loans, home loans, checking, savings and more; often scattered among many branches. I did the work manually for 40 Northern California branches. Then I tried the same thing on the computer. While I could transform street descriptors (st., street, ln, lane, ave., avenue, etc) into a standard form, there were so many other irregularities that my best matches on the computer were only 90% compared to matching by hand-eye. That was useless for 60 million bankwide accounts. Until the standard use of Social Security numbers in banking, the computer was useless for matching accounts.
From the mid-1960s forward I did many survey research jobs outside of bank work and always used computers at public c
omputer sharing companies to do the tabulating. Questionnaires could be read by OCR machines.
By 1968 I had my own programmable 10- key calculator with 4 memory locations; it was in my office at the Bank of California. I programmed it to take the day’s date and the user’s birth date and time of birth and generate a random number from 1 to 30. The number was then used to find a page in a horoscope book. A steady stream of bank employees came to my office to get their daily horoscope. Call me a cynic if you wish.
By 1971 I wrote my first book, The Seven Laws of Money which I had typeset and laid out on a commercial computer. The layout was on a magnetic disc. When the book finally was published by Random House in early 1974, I had the book put on the SPIRES computer at Stanford. I hoped it would be read and commented on by computer users. No one ever noticed or said anything.
By then, I was using a portable teletype keyboard with a one line monitor and a modem. I connected to other modems with monitors (once to my office from Japan) as well as to the ARPAnet. Not much to connect to except for the bulletin board at the New Jersey Institute of Technology called EIES.
I worked with the hippie techies at the Community Memory and Resource One. It was a dream with little use. On the other hand the Home Brew Computer Club in Menlo Park joined the Briarpatch Network (which I founded) and I consulted with them several times to help make the business work. I knew most of the people involved but not Jobs or Wozniak. I did work a lot with John Draper (Cap’t Crunch) father of the black box and the blue box.
As soon as they came out I got a simple Radio Shack computer with tape cassette memory and then the first semi-portable Kaypro II in 1982.
I wrote my second book Honest Business on the Kaypro with Salli Rasberry. One line at a time with only line editing. If I forgot to ‘save’ regularly I often could lose a whole page and have to re-write it.
Many important developers of computer programs and internet protocols were members of the Briarpatch. Too many to remember.
When Stewart Brand created the Well in 1985, I joined and used it. My email as an early user was [email protected]. It still is.
Computers became ubiquitous by the 1990’s; I have used many different versions since then.
By the end of the 2000 teens, the computer based social media programs Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon had done more damage to the young United States of America, with censorship and utter stupidity, than any military attack in history.
A tragic outcome to a lifetime of computers. The destruction of the society that created them.
The Dutch invaded England and brought their technology and commercial innovations to a large semi-educated population which used the novel Dutch financial tools to create a global navy and a colonial empire. Including the colonies in America. An accident of poor governing by James II.
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