Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Golden Geek: Growing Up Geek

On 2008-10-04, Scott Hanselman kicked off “Meme Time: Growing Up Geek.”  It is not clear that he got many takers, most comments proposing demerits for young Scott breaking the nerd code at the time.  I took it to be a cool idea, and after gestating the heck out of it, I don’t have much more than I originally thought of.  So there.

In 1954, between 9th and 10th grade, I had a moderately-illegal part-time job in a camera shop.  It was also the first job I was ever fired from.  This was also the time that my interest in photography kicked into high gear.

I notice that the camera in my hand has a bellows, leading me to think that it was an early Kodak Retina.  There are a couple of other possibilities, and I think early Voigtlander was one of them.  Looking more closely, it might simply be a bellows-equipped roll-film camera too.

Since the left photograph of me is on a strip of negative that is mine, I suspect it was taken with a borrowed Kodak Pony 35, a basic 35mm camera with a fixed-mounting lens and some basic manual controls and crude focus ability (without a rangefinder).  The shop owner let me use it until I managed to save up for my first 35mm single-lens-reflex camera.  The photographer was probably Jerry Hanson.

These cameras were completely manual and my reflex camera had a ground-glass image field that I had to look down into.  It had a flip-out magnifier too.

It is interesting that photography and printing were two of my fascinations.  I remember how I and another guy would draw our own newspaper in the 3rd grade (and he had a chemistry set, which inspired considerable envy on my part).  At one point, my father had found an old jack screw and some heavy boards, fashioning a flat-bed press for me.   I put lead movable type into a little rack and I’d turn the row screws so tight that the line of type would blow up in the middle and explode out of the frame.

The printing press didn’t last long.  The steel jack-screw was much stronger than the wooden frame of my miniature Franklin and I sprung it in short order.  My frustration wasn’t abated until I won a little Smith Corona manual portable typewriter by selling enough newspaper subscriptions to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the only morning paper delivered in Tacoma. 

One thing that having a 35mm camera allowed was considerable practice at basement darkroom work.  My photo buddy, Jerry Hanson, and I learned to buy bulk film and load our own film cartridges.  My big game was to seriously underexpose Tri-X film and work at push-processing it.  The fascination was with available-light photography, barely passable.  My efforts at over-development and use of intensifiers to salvage images probably explains why most of my negatives from that time are fogged and barely usable. 

My father built my first darkroom enlarger.  It used a large potato-chip can for the light housing, with a regular low-wattage frosted bulb.  The base of the housing was cut out and held a piece of ground glass as a diffuser.  beneath that, made with several layers of plywood, was a negative carrier with a wood slide.  Beneath that, an old bellows camera was mounted for use as the lens and focus assembly.  This arrangement was connected by a pipe fitting and wing-nut screw to a vertical pipe that was attached to the wooden base below the entire setup.  It was actually serviceable, although vibration could ruin a print.

I used that enlarger and a darkroom in the corner of the basement (with cardboard covers for the few windows) until I left home. 

Around 1961 I acquired a Beseler 23C enlarger that I kept, mostly in storage, until putting it out in a Silicon Valley yard sale in 1998.

It is surprising that I managed to work around my own darkroom.  I was not much into manual activity, a deficiency that I did not remedy until 1978 when I finally taught myself enough electronics to assemble and check-out my own Heathkit H8, H89, and Z90 computers, terminals, and terminal computers.

More typical, for me, was playing chess and collecting stamps.  My stamp collecting started when my grandfather brought me some plate blocks and a small U.S. album.  It was not long before I had the ambition to design my own comprehensive album that would have a place for every stamp in the Scott catalogs of the time.  I learned a lot about Abyssinia (now officially Ethiopia) and Afghanistan almost did me in with the highly-repetitious early issues with their complex Arabic inscriptions.  I gave up in the middle of Algeria.  The pages were all hand-drawn.  Now I could entertain such a project using a computer and document-generation software for producing custom (mini-) albums.  I no longer have the interest.

Chess was different.  It was perhaps the most-social activity I engaged in, other than taking photographs around the school for inclusion in the year-book.  I started playing in the high-school chess team, going to chess club meetings at the Tacoma Public Library, and playing in tournaments from time-to-time.  It was at the chess club that I met Jerry Cook, the senior who was, in 1956, keen for us to learn about computers and what they were all about.

It is perhaps unsurprising that postal chess had strong appeal for me.  I began a series of collections of opening lines, dutifully adding them on pasted-in pages of my copy of Modern Chess Openings.  Using little rubber stamps to make chess diagrams on the post cards having my moves was another great opportunity.

For a time I combined my interest in chess and in publishing by writing the junior chess column for the Washington State Chess Letter.  I also made illustrations.  The approach to desktop publishing was to type on special master sheets consisting of a coated plastic film that the typewriter letters would penetrate enough for use as a mimeograph stencil.  The illustrations were scribed by hand using a tool designed for that purpose.

I abandoned chess in the mid-70s when I realized that it was too much like my work, rather than being a respite from work.  I still muse about some ideas I have for a computer chess-playing framework.

Another passion was chasing trains.  It combined my interest in photography and a fascination for the rapidly-dying age of steam.  I was also interested in model railroading, mostly second-hand with my high-school buddy, Jerry Hanson.  He had the space and the funds for a layout.  We spent our time manually spiking rails onto cork roadbeds and assembling and detailing cars and structures built from kits. 

Jerry and I spent hours drawing track layouts, understanding narrow-gauge operation used in Western logging railroads, and collecting photographs from the steam-locomotive graveyards near Tacoma.  Jerry managed to make money selling rail photos.

There was an overlap of interest with stamp collecting too, and there was a time when we decided to issue our own postal stamps and arrange for commemorative use, special cancellations and other fabrications.  We were a two-man sand-dune philately operation.

I was also a math and science nerd in high school.  If there was any social stigma to it, I was oblivious. 

I took all of the mathematics courses that were available in a pre-Sputnik public school, and we got a peek at calculus in the last algebra course.  I took all of the chemistry, biology, and physics, ending up as the Bausch & Lomb science scholar in my graduating class.  I didn’t end up at the University of Rochester, but fate would have me in Rochester for 20 years later in my career.

I had no idea that I would attend college, although my high-school chemistry teacher and others encouraged me.  I was so weird about it that I only applied to two colleges in my senior year: Caltech and MIT.  I was stunned to be admitted to both, and I ended up at Caltech.  Mr. sophisticated math guy is shown in this pose with pipe, room-mates drinking mug, and a slide-rule atop the papers on the desk.  The clip-on bow tie adds a nice touch, don’t you think?  Yes, we dressed for evening meals in those days.

At Caltech I learned that I had no idea what I was doing there, wanting to understand all of it very badly without working hard.  I dropped out after two quarter terms.  It was all a mystery to me.  And I saw someone actually creating a computer program in raw punch-out-the bits machine language.  That I never forget.

Labels: Golden Geek

posted by orcmid at 12/31/2008 06:42:00 PM