Gregg Sporar's Blog

Five Things

I had thought by the time it got to me, this whole five things tagging would have already gone from wired to tired to expired. Perhaps it has. In any event, Roumen tagged me so here I am.

1. The first computer program I ever wrote was in RPG. Needless to say, this was many years ago. I was taking a vocational data processing course in high school. We were taught on an ancient UNIVAC system. It was a two-year course and we eventually learned FORTRAN and COBOL as well. They even got us a TRS-80 so that we could learn BASIC.


2. My wife Kelley and I are taking ballroom dance lessons. I doubt we will ever look like the folks on Dancing With The Stars, but it is fun. We sort of know the Foxtrot, Waltz, and East Coast Swing. We are attempting to learn the Rhumba.


3. The last 'r' in my last name is silent. So it's pronounced spore-uh. I have researched the church records in my great-grandfather's Croatian home town - the spelling of the name was inconsistent back in those days. In some entries it is recorded as S-p-o-r-a-r, other times S-p-o-r-e-r.
   
   I could not find any information on the 'ar' version, but according to A Dictionary of Surnames the 'er' spelling originated in Germany as a variant of Spohrer. It is "an occupational name for a maker of spurs," derived from the old German word for spur, which was spor. So apparently, centuries ago I had an ancestor who made spurs. Given that a spur is an irritant used in an attempt to bring about action, some who know me no doubt consider that fitting. :-)


4. One night each week I volunteer at a local public library. I have been doing this since 1993. I mostly just do clerical stuff to help out the over-worked staff.


5. Kelley and I climbed a mountain. Well, there were no ice axes or ropes involved, so I guess it would be more accurate to say we hiked to the summit of a mountain, Pikes Peak. The trail head is at 6,600 feet (2,012 meters) and after walking uphill for 12.6 miles (20.3 kilometers) we made it to the summit at 14,110 feet (4,301 meters) above sea level. That's an average grade of about 11%, which even with all the training we did, was no easy feat for a couple of middle-aged flatlanders like us.

Comments

• Now that is a little bit of a scary parallel -- the first programming language I ever got paid to write code in was RPG II, on a Univac 9300, in 1974 at the university I was attending (and then also became a paid employee for -- interesting how getting married motivates you to find a source of income :-). We had a pretty typical system environment for the time ... three hard disks (IIRC, roughly 30mb with removable platters of about ten disk surfaces each), six magnetic tape drives, and of course the obligatory card reader and punch devices.

  The most amusing part of my story is that the University thought they had splurged on main memory for the "mainframe" we were using. We had an entire 32 kilobytes of core memory ... and with RPG being a batch oriented language, we did not always have a good handle on how to use it all!

  Posted by: craig_mcc on January 07, 2007 at 11:46 PM

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