History of Virtual Bill

By Bill Stewart

The first PCs

One of the first mass-marketed personal computers was the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I was among the first to buy one in 1977. Back then about all you could do was program in the BASIC programming language (developed by Bill Gates!) which was actually stored on a chip as part of the computer system. Without a program like that, nothing would happen when a computer was turned on.

It was done this way because floppy disk drives were so expensive that cassette tape recorders were more commonly used to store programs and data. Forget about hard disk drives. We would actually buy our programs on cassette tape. Each time we wanted to use the program we would have to put the cassette tape in the tape recorder and hit the play button to load the program. To save letters and other data we created with our programs, we would have to put another cassette tape in, push the record button and tell the program to save—always being mindful of not recording over top something else. Today, floppy and hard disk drives do essentially the same thing that cassette tape recorders did back then.

Booting then and now

When you power up a modern PC, the operating system program (Windows in most cases—another product brought to us by Bill Gates) is automatically loaded and we're off and running. This process is known as "booting." But without a hard or floppy disk to store the operating system (and all of our other programs) we can't boot up and there are no programs available to use. And, without a program to control it, we can't do anything with our computer.

With the BASIC program stored on a chip in the early Radio Shack, Apple and Commodore computers, at least there was a program for us to use when we turned the computer on. As a result many started out learning to program in BASIC—whether they needed to or not. There wasn't much else to do.

As primitive as this sounds, computers essentially work the same way today. Disk drives long ago replace cassette tape recorders and programs have become much more sophisticated but the underlying principles and concepts have not changed.

Bill's first computer

I decided to buy a computer because it was apparent that something important was going on here. I would visit a Radio Shack store from time to time and play a bit with the computer on display and even though I didn't know much about it, I was fascinated.

As soon as I could scrape the money together, I bought one. I was particularly intrigued by BASIC and very quickly learned to write simple, fun, but relatively useless programs. It seemed like such an incredibly powerful tool that I continued learning more about it.

A new career in programming

Back in those days if you knew anything at all you knew more than most people. So it wasn't long before I starting picking up programming jobs. For me it was a hobby.

In 1978, I attended a course in BASIC programming at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a non-credit course offered to the general public and taught by George Lillard. George and I became life-long friends. Today he is a very successful business man and owner of Discovery Systems of Houston.

A new career in teaching

It wasn't long before I was filling in for George when he couldn't make to his classes. I realized then that teaching was something I had a real knack for. George eventually turned his classes over to me and I developed a rapport with the folks in the Continuing Education department. I wrote a program for them to handle their registrations. In 1984 they asked me to put together a comprehensive set of computer and business related classes. This where Computer Orientation got started.

Computer Orientation is born

In my BASIC classes I realized I had to explain about how computers work before we could even think about programming. Computer Orientation evolved from this.

Even in those early days, computer classes focussed more on applications that on understanding computers. My idea was to make Computer Orientation a prerequisite for all applications. We made it very inexpensive (which was easy given the lecture format). It proved to be a very successful formula because it induced people to start at the beginning and get a solid foundation. And because they had such a positive experience, they naturally came to us for everything else.

In 1990 I set up the Computer Center at Leisure Learning Unlimited in Houston using the same format and have had more than 12,000 people come through the Computer Orientation classes alone.