About Me!

Nicknames and Handles

I'll start with a few words (well, maybe a lot of words) about "*E-TECH*".

I got hooked on computers while attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In the second half of my sophomore year I took a class in BASIC programming using a Data General Nova minicomputer. That summer, between my sophomore and junior years, I discovered the university's administrative computer center, which had a real mainframe computer! An IBM 360 model 30, with 64K of genuine ferrite-core memory and three model 2311 disk drives, with a combined disk capacity totaling a whopping 21 megabytes! The system also had COBOL, PL/1 and Assembler, real languages when compared to the BASIC that I'd just been exposed to.

It may be hard for those of you brought up on Windows and Pentium-class computers to appreciate this, but Loyola's mainframe was a completely non-interactive, batch oriented system. We punched up our jobs on Hollerith cards, stacked them on the card reader, and then waited while the system processed jobs, one at a time. Depending on the number of students working on assignments, you could wait hours for your 30-seconds on the computer. Typically, the deck of cards that made up your unit of work was called a "job" and the first card in your deck was called a "job card" and identified your work from all of the jobs being submitted by other students.

There were two important items of information that had to be punched on the job card: one was a name for the job itself ("stats" or "compile" for example) and the second was a name that identified the student who submitted the job. When your job was run, the output was printed on an IBM 1403 line printer, a huge box that printed on the big, 15" by 11" fan-fold paper that's almost become extinct because of the advent of laser printers. The first page of your output had three lines of information printed in big block letters: your name, the date and then the job's name. Like most students, I started out using my last name on the job card. But the "separator page" only had room for 8 characters of the student and job name, which meant that my name was being truncated to "CHEVALIE". Not very distinctive, and I missed that last letter.

One day I happened to be reading an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology (to this day, one of my favorite magazines) which mentioned a firm called "Softech". I assumed this to be an acronym for "Software Technology". As I read the article, it occurred to me that if someone could have "Software Technology", then why couldn't I have "Eric's Technology"? Hmm, "E Tech". Add asterisks at each end and a hyphen in between, and you have "*E-TECH*" which is exactly 8 characters. It looked very impressive at the top of my separator page!

So *E-TECH* became a nice, convenient handle that's stayed with me ever since. I think it works much better than "lemon bear," which was a nickname that my family used during my teens. (I'll write about that story some other time.)

Over time I'll flesh out this page with more information about yours truly. Until then, I hope you enjoy the rest of this site!