My grandmother had passed away in 1985, and she had left her house in Golden to my dad and my aunt. My dad had bought out my aunt’s half of the house, and as of October of 1985 we were living in Golden, on East Street, which means I was attending Golden High School for the 11th grade.
Golden H.S. was a run-down, confusing, campus-like collection of buildings that were probably built in the 1940’s – which was pure culture shock when you came from the ultra-modern 7-year-old Skyline H.S. in Longmont. It also had probably five times the student population…
And being as the new school year started in August of ’85 and I didn’t get registered until October because of the move, I didn’t get a choice on my classes and was just slotted into what had room.
So, I was in all the really stupid electives no one else wanted to take – and it sucked.
This also means I was in the Skyline Yearbook for 1985-1986 even though I was in Golden for the school year…
And then winter happened right after I arrived in Golden… So, I got to walk through the cold between buildings to get to classrooms that were cold to deal with teachers and students that were cold… I hated it there.
I wasn’t really happy with being uprooted and moving away from everything and everyone I knew in Longmont either. I had something of a social life and a lot of friends that I had to up and dump just because dad got a deal on a bigger house…
During the upheaval I got an Atari 800XL as something of a concession prize from my parents, which I updated with two Happy-mod 1050 disk-drives and an XM301 300 baud modem.
Being as I didn’t know anyone in Golden, I spent most of my time at home connected to the Colorado School of Mines terminal system (a local call) where I could get access to other online resources via CSNET without incurring the long-distance charges that pissed off my parents.
While the situation truly sucked, life wasn’t all bad, I guess… I got my driver’s license in February when I turned 17, and my parents split the cost of a car with me. Now, it wasn’t much of a car; a 1969 Toyota Corona that cost all of like $300 – but it was mine.
I honestly think the reason they went in on the car with me is they were tired of driving me across town to school. But, whatever – I was enjoying the freedom. It also let me land another job, such as it was.
I was working at King’s Table on Colfax part time, but any money is good money when you’re 17. That and west Colfax was the cruising capital of the Midwest on the 80’s… Sure, my car was laughable – but that didn’t matter much.
Golden High School did have one thing about it that I liked; they had an Advanced Placement Computer Science class that was held at the county’s mainframe center… After I’d aced the placement test, I got to ride a bus over there every other morning to work on professional grade hardware.
It also got me a login for the terminal system they were using for the data entry portion of the class, which I quickly discovered had levels of access…
To make a long story short, this was my first legit “system hack”. I gave myself supervisor privileges on the school’s S/36 by way of finding an overflow in the classroom application’s user menus that caused the session to drop to an unprotected command line…
This led to my getting a talking to from a system administrator… But it was more of a head-pat because he was impressed that I had figured out the S/36 on the fly with no manual or instruction. And this ended with me getting to spend time on the actual mainframe instead of doing data entry – as long as I promised to lay off the hacking.
I did a lot of tape loading, but I also got to write and run some of my own code on the IBM 3081 that lived in a pressurized airlocked elevated floor cleanroom. It was basically about as high-tech as it got, and I had access.
Back in the real world my disillusionment with Golden H.S. was complete, and I spent most of the 1986 school year hanging out in the library at school, working on my own research projects, and skipping all of the electives I’d been forced to take.
Yeah, I know it was dumb. But by skipping some really bad electives I probably advanced my knowledge of computer systems and programming by two years.
I did eventually get caught though and expelled for non-attendance in May of 86. The principle was very confused as I’d been at school every day, for the entire day, but in the library instead of classes… It was his suggestion that I take the GED as I was clearly a bright kid who was just bored with school.
Two weeks later, on May 21st, I’d taken and passed my GED.
And I was very happy to not have to go back to Golden H.S. ever again…
Things understandably went pretty pear-shaped with my parents after this, and accordingly I started thinking about enlisting. It would get me out of the house and away from things there, the Navy had some pretty high-tech stuff going on, and the recruiter said they would cover the cost of a 4-year degree – and they didn’t care if I had a GED; if I could pass the entry exam at a school, I could get a degree.
I was pretty sure I could pass any exam they threw at me…