I recently blogged about my first article ever published. This post is about my second article. But don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a series. I have no idea what my third article was or where it was published.
Although I promised myself I’d never ever write again after my first agonizing piece, once I saw my work in print, I quickly forgot the painful birthing experience. A few short weeks later, I was again writing.
At the time, computers were emerging as accessible, viable tools. I took a computer class to learn Fortran. (A few years later, I worked briefly as a programmer using polyForth, but I digress.)
Without going into boring detail, I ended up using the College’s computer lab to write a program to do some number crunching to track down a radio station interference problem at work; it was an intense program.
This was in the days of mainframes; the computer lab assistant observed my program sucking up all the computer resources allocated to me—so he gave me more! Still it took a couple hours to run.
Eventually, I wrote an article about it called, “Computers Track Down Intermodulation Interference,” published in Mobile Radio Technology magazine. The editors even sent a photographer to snap some pictures, which they included in the article. This was all heady stuff for a wet-behind-the-ears techno-geek.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, the program worked great, but the reams of output brought us no closer to figuring out the cause of the interference.
At least I got an article out of it.
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Peter Lyle DeHaan is an author, blogger, and publisher with over 30 years of writing and publishing experience. Check out his book Successful Author FAQs for insider tips and insights.