20 year High School Reunion

Sep 10, 2007 Published by Tony Primerano

Wow. I'm getting old. I graduated from Liverpool High School (NY) in 1988. I was adding an entry to the "iworkontheweb" tag on flickr and it brought back some high school memories.

Back in 1988, my high school Pascal teacher told us not to go into computer science, since all those jobs were heading to India. Yes. I said 1988. This didn't matter to me because I wanted to be an EE. But as I started looking for co-ops, perspective employers kept noticing that I knew assembler and some higher level languages. So I kept getting programming jobs. I never did land a job as an Electrical Engineer and I eventually finished my MSCS after about 9 years of working as a software engineer.
I thought it was interesting that back in 1988 there were already predictions that software jobs were going to move out of the country. Our teacher, Mr Murray also taught us the value of team programming. The class broke into 2 teams at the end of the semester and worked on projects. My team did an attendance program for the school. It ran on an Apple 2e and lived on a 5.25 inch floppy disk. I'm not sure if it was ever used but it was a great learning experince.
I don't keep in touch with anyone from my graduating class and I probably wouldn't recognize anyone if I bumped into them. But I have our final project printout. Here are the comments from the code. (Not these were in all CAPS.. when was lowercase introduced to computers?) :-)

This program is courtesy of the following students from Mr. Murray's Period 10 Computer Science 3/4 class (Pascal):

Vasin Paesang (Bing)

Alan Ours (Al)

Chris Cunningham (Moose)

Kevin Foley (Spike)

Kevin Kortkamp (Bong)

Tony Primerano

Rob Paradise

Diana Davidson

Lo Yang-Chun (James)

  • A photo of Sonya Sonya says:

    Are you going to go to your 20th reunion?

  • depends on when it is.

  • A photo of Gregg Sanford Gregg Sanford says:

    Hey everybodu, I'm a fellow 1988 LHS grad, and I was just wondering if any of you have heard anything about a 20th year reunion. I've talked with a few people, and nobody seems to have any info. If anybody has any info, could you please post here or contact me at fallonme88@yahoo.com? Thanks! Gregg Sanford

  • Google seems to like this post for finding LHS reunion information so I created a google group for people to join. Details here

  • A photo of Sarah Nett Sarah Nett says:

    I graduated in 88 too and I recognize quite a few names on your old school project.

  • FYI. information on the reunion can be found here http://tonycode.com/wiki/index.php?title=Liverpool_High_School_Class_of_1988_Reunion

  • Hi Tony...I graduated in '88 & I'm on the reunion committee & stumbled upon your blog. The reunion is set for Columbus Day Weekend (October 10-12, 2008) We're working on an informal gathering on Friday night...TBA and the main event is on Saturday night at the Empire Room at the fairgrounds. We are asking everyone to please register their contact information on the LHS alumni site...there is a link from our website...http://lhsclassof88.blogspot.com/. We will be contacting everyone via email. We are asking for everyone's help in reaching as many classmates as possible. If anyone has contact info please contact one of us...again all of our contact info is on our website. Any questions...please don't hesitate to get in touch with one of us. Hope to see you in October!! Glad I stumbled upon you!! Thanks for starting the Google Group...great idea!!

  • A photo of Bing Bing says:

    Wow! I stumbled across this searching on Google! I remember that attendance program group project written in Pascal with a file system database. I believe I still have the source code on 5.25" floppies in some box somewhere also. Tony, do you still maintain this Blog? I'll see if I can fine you on Facebook.

  • Yeah.. Still here. I have the printouts still but I suspect I tossed the disks long ago.