Markwood Corporation

I worked here after I finished up at DES. Well really after the 100+ contractors at DES got fired. I quit for a week to be a headhunter. But headhunting sucks and I came back.

I learned the C programming language here and wrote an operating system that controls the cooking at restuarants.

I used Lattice C and wrote code on an IBM PC which cost $10,000 and had a 10 megabyte hard disk with a whopping 256K of memory which I later expanded to the full 640K of memory.

At first i used edlin to write my code but they forced me to used WordStar as my editor. I later swiched to Bob Wallaces PC Write which is much faster because it keeps the whole file in memory. PC Write can edit files as big as 64K bytes, that's right a full 64,000 bytes.

I was making $25 an hour at this job and it was lots of fun.

The only bad thing about the job was when it rained the stable to the west stunk like krap on the outside. But you couldn't smell it inside.

I also got slapped in the face a few times for saying "IPL" and "core" and was forced to use words like "boot" or "re-boot" and "memory" around all the engineers who worked here who were used to working on microcomputers instead of mainframes. IPL is slang for "initial program load" which mainframe computer programmers say when the mainframe computer is "re-booted". Core is a mainfrme computer word that means computer memory. In the old days computer memory was made out of these tiny chunks of metal called "core" which looked like a doughnut but was the size of a head of a pin. Wires running thu the doughnut hole magnetized and demagentized the core to set it to a zero or one. And a second set of wires running thru the doughnut hole sensed the state of the "core" ie: was it currently a one or a zero.