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Mr. Pierce's Lifetime
Mr. Pierce has been around since 1957 -
When I Was Born
When I was born, my family already owned an RCA Victor record player and radio. Every morning my father listened to the news on the radio. At night he would come home and put records on the record player and sit and listen to someone like Nat King Cole while reading the newspaper and waiting for dinner to be ready. -
My first electronics kit
I was given my first electronics exploration kit for Christmas. I used wires connected to electronic parts in the kit to create simple devices. There was a speaker in the kit that I used to make a radio that actually worked. I also made crazy sounds with the speaker that my mom didn't like very much. -
Supermarket Scanners
In the summer of 1980 I was an assistant manager at a chain supermarket in Alaska. When the company installed the first UPC scanners and computer checkout systems in the state, I was chosen to be a local support person. I helped the company keep the equipment working and did a little programming to make the cash registers do new things. -
My first full-featured computer
An amazing friend of mine saw that I loved working with computers at work and told me I should think about pursuing a computer career. He even helped me buy my first computer, an Osborne 1 micro computer. The Osborne 1 included everything I needed to learn how to program. I ordered a mail correspondence programming course and completed it in two months. I then wrote software that I could use to do the time consuming accounting at the supermarket where I was an assistant manager. -
Corporate programming
I moved my family to the San Francisco Bay Area and started working as a computer programmer. I wrote software that ran on large mainframe computers. -
Deep Blue Programmer
The pinnacle of my computer programming career occurred when I worked for IBM as an enterprise architect. I wrote software to process huge amounts of data on multiple processors on a super computer at the same time. The software predicted the number of each style, size, and color of each product sold by a large clothing manufacturer would be sold during upcoming seasons. The super computer I used was the same type as Watson, the computer that won a championship round on Jeopardy. -
Teaching with Technology
Today I am using technology to enhance my lessons and enrich the learning experience for my 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students. My favorite computing device is my Thinkpad 2 Tablet, a Windows 8 tablet with an active stylus (pen) that makes it easy to take handwritten notes. My one and one-half pound tablet has more computing power and storage than the company mainframe computer that was in an air-conditioned warehouse in 1984.
