I was excited to see Mr Walton is still alive and kicking. He was one of my Professors at MDCC, 45+ years ago… now MDC. He was very important to my computer career. He gave me a job working with the DEC PDP minicomputer. I also worked across the hall, tearing mainframe listings apart and putting them in the students mailbox. My first night shutting down the PDP, I leaned over the keyboard and hit something that threw out some error message. My first night…great! I was tempted to just power it off and leave. But what if my actions caused it to not come back up for the classes the next day? So, nervously, I called him, and he assured me it wasn’t a big deal. I took advanced IBM 370 Assembly and JCL, among other courses with him.
There were multiple tutors working both sides during the week, but only me working both sides on Saturday.
I was writing a program to log students out of the PDP, when he walked in and asked me what I was doing. Again, nervously I told him. I was using a privileged account so you could mess things up if you weren’t careful, like root on Linux. A misplaced “delete *,*” would be disastrous. But he didn’t give me a hard time at all.
Another thing I remember was, he was a Christian. I believe he went to the same church as my parents.
I reached out to him a few years ago, or someone I thought may be him. And received no response. However, I read “It is estimated that Walton has taught and mentored more than 18,000 students”. So it’s likely he wouldn’t remember me. I only had maybe 4 instructor/Professors, not 18,000 to remember, and I only remember 2, Mr Walton & Mr Andrews. They taught me the bulk of my computer courses. I had a different instructor for Fortran and a different instructor for RPG (at a totally different campus). So I don’t fault him. No hard feelings. I hope he continues to have a great life.
Actually I contacted another person from the college, a fellow student that became a instructor there. We took some classes there, and got along good. He didn’t return my contact attempt either. Perhaps I violated some unspoken code? Perhaps I should have tried to contact them, especially Mr Walton through the years, to update them about my status in the field. To let them know I had a great career in computers. I honestly never thought about it. But thinking about it now, it does seem perhaps a little ungrateful. I’m a loner and don’t have great social skills.