Gutenberg on Broadway

Not There Yet

Observations from the arrival of the Information Age.

I had a part time job at the ComputerLand store on West Broadway in Vancouver, British Columbia in the early 1980s. Mostly it was to teach an introductory programming course in the BASIC computer language on Saturday mornings. Ironically, it was one of the few things for which you bought a computer back then?—?to learn how to program them. The store manager didn’t see any point in sending me home after the morning class ended and had me stooge around on the sales floor instead. I was typically assigned the enthusiasts who would, without fail, walk in and want to bend the ear of a so-called expert. Lacking any real experts, I was provided in their stead...

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Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was published contemporaneously. (image: IBM Canada’s King Street Datacentre circa 1964. Photograph by George Dunbar, courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation, ©International Business Machines Corporation.)