Originally recorded March 12, 2024.

When I was in my senior year of High School in 1997, I had a lot of "electives" to take. I did all the heavier classes earlier in High School, so I had to fill my schedule with classes that I was never going to usea time waster year.

I took Oceanography. The teacher gave the class an ultimatum at the end of the year. Final project was to write a "book" about plants and animals that would be found in particular body of water. I got stuck with the Gulf Of California. The teacher needed this "book" to be in large type, and would need to have color pictures. The reason for this was the following year, she would be teaching Oceanography to 6th graders. The ultimatum was to score 90% or above on this final project, and be exempt from the final exam. Well, I was all for that, so I put my all into this project, as I do with any project.

This was allowed to be a group project, or you could work alone. I chose to work alone so I could get the job done properly without anybody else providing either misinformation, or not contributing.

But I was the computer guy. While you could do the old "cut and paste" with scissors and glue, I wanted to computerize it. Me, being the old hardware guy, it became apparent that the computer was not up to the task. It was frustrating, to say the absolute least. On a 486 computer with maybe 24MB of RAM, and Windows 3.1, this wasn't boding well. Cutting to the chase, by the end of the project, it would take 30 minutes to load the file in a word processor, and 25 minutes to save. Adding anything to it was equally painful. Of course I wasn't going to get a comptuer to complete this project and further my studies into collegeat least not yet. So I had to deal with this slowness.

The next problem was printing this in color in 1997. While there were certainly color inkjets on the market, they were expensive, and of course, so was the ink. Another option would be to take the report, somehow to the "paper fastener" store, decked out in red, and have them print it. Getting my father to "shake a few Shekels out" was going to be an impossibliliy.

I had recently done some work for out next door neighbor at the time. I set up the new computer he bought, and indeed, he did have a color inkjet printer. I asked him if it would be possible that I could print this at his house. He agreed. I told him that this included a lot of color pictures and might drain the ink cartridges, to which he replied "if they run out, I'll by new ones". I couldn't believe it was going to be this easy!

Well it actually wasn't. The file was about 50MB or so. CD burners weren't common in 1997, and no flash drives existed? The only way was an Iomega ZIP drive, which I had. So I packed up the drive, the disk, the cables, power adapter, and driver diskette, and went over there. I had to pull the computer out of the desk I put together, disconnect his parallel port printer (there was no USB at this time, at least not useable like today), connect the ZIP drive to the parallel port, then hook the printer into the passthrough port. I also had to bring 6 floppy disks that contained the word processor I used to create the program. With all of that, I got the word processor installed, ZIP drive driver installed, rebooted, and the drive was online. I took the liberty of copying the file to the hard drive, which would avoid any collisions on the parallel port and slow everything down to a crawl. I opened the word processor, told it to open the file, and it opened in 30 seconds flat!!!!!! Here I was, waiting 30 minutes at home, and this machine (obviously, considerably newer with a Pentium 166MHz processor and 64MB of RAM) could open it in 30 seconds! The HELL I went through! I couldn't believe it opened so fast, so I closed the program and reopened it and the file and BAM, there it was! OK, File, Print, right, everything is correct, and Print. The printer fired up and faithfully printed this "book" in color! I was saved!

When I turned this in to the teacher when it was due, I told her in no uncertain terms would I accept anything less than 100% on this project. I scored 100%, and was exempt from the final.

My life has been filled with struggles through and through. Many of these struggles could have been resolved by simply "shaking a few Shekels out", but that was an impossibility in my upbringing. These days, I could just go and buy a whole setup just to print it, but I wasn't afforded the luxury of growing up like that. This continues to this day.

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