100 Years for Ed Hillstead

Ed Hillstead has paid his dues for mem-bership in the Central Florida Computer Society which he’s been a part of for over thirty years. That’s a long time for a computer club, but even longer for Ed; the next time he pays, he’ll be 100 years old.

As humans go, 100 is not so rare anymore, although you’d still be impressed with Ed. He spends hours each day on his computer, often working with the stock market, but he did give up his square dancing recently. His sage stock market advice: “You never go broke taking a profit.”

When Ed joined the Central Florida Computer Society (CFCS), which meets at the Bahia Shrine on Pembrook Ave. the third Sunday of each month, he owned a TRS-80. There were no IBM-PCs yet, nor Apple Macintoshes. The Apple I had been introduced (at another computer group in California called “The Homebrew Computer Club” with members Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) in 1976; the IBM-PC came out in 1981, the Macintosh in 1984.

Many of the members of the CFCS grew up with these computers, and they have helped new people learn to use them lo these many years. Their motto is “users helping users.” Newer, younger members join for the wise advice and ex-perience of the veterans who have learned all there is to know about each new device and program as it came along. Each month is filled with informa-tive small meetings called Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which meet all over Orlando to discuss such things as Microsoft Office, Access, PDAs, digital photography, etc. They also help other members fix their computers when problems arise.

Ed was born in Kansas where his father William and grandfather John owned a hardware store and sold real estate. Ed’s father had been born in Kansas in 1876. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place five years later, less than 150 miles away. Ed’s grandfather, born in Norway in 1848, had an adventuresome disposition which caused him to run away from home at twelve years of age. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada, he settled just after the American Civil War, into what had so recently been called ‘Bleeding Kan-sas.’ It was still the Kansas of Buffalo Bill Cody, who helped his father in the fight against slavery. John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre and Quan-trill’s Raiders were recent memories. By the time the First World War started, William and his son John (Ed’s father) owned 3,500 acres of rich Kansas farmland and ran mercantile businesses at Marvin, Logan and Hoxie.

Ed remembers many newfangled inven-tions becoming popular in his youth: the first Model T had arrived in 1908, instant coffee (1909), Edi-son’s motion pictures (1910), Life Savers (1912), and just in time for World War I, the gas mask in 1914. The first radio tuner arrived in 1916, but short wave radio did not arrive until 1919, when Ed was eleven. He had opened his first bank account at age ten. In-troduced early to crystal radios and the slide rule, he naturally gravitated to engineering. Graduating from Roxie High School in 1925, he studied engi-neering in college. It was the golden age of American invention, and Ed watched it all: insu-lin (1922), traffic signals and cathode-ray tubes for future televisions and computers (1923), loud-speakers (1924), liquid-fueled rockets (1926), analog computers and Scotch tape (1930), the electron microscope (1931), the zoom lens and light meter (1932). 1933 was a bounty year with FM radio, stereo re-cords, and drive-in movie thea-ters. In the rest of the 1930s Ed ob-served the Monopoly game, mag-netic tape recorders, canned beer, photo copi-ers, jet en-gines, ball-point pens, Teflon, and helicopters. It was time for World War II.

Ed had moved to the Dutch island of Aruba in 1930, to work as an engineer in the oil refinery there. Aruba's proximity to oil-rich Venezuela had prompted Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), to complete in1929 what was then the largest oil refinery and storage facil-ity in the world near the town of San Nicolas: the Lago Oil and Transport Company. Ed stayed on the island through the war, helping produce gaso-line to keep the United States air force flying in the Pacific.

The war had started early for Ed. In 1939, the Germans secretly deployed numerous subma-rines across the Atlantic near the coast of South America. Some of these submarines were de-ployed to make Aruba and other islands their base for later attacks. Their goal was to attack Aruba’s refineries and to torpedo any tankers carrying crude oil to other refineries from the oil fields of Venezuela. To supply their submarines, the Nazis sent a 400 ft. long freighter, the Antilla, which was disguised as a peaceful commercial ship working in neutral waters off the Dutch islands. In reality, the freighter secretly housed a deadly arsenal of torpedoes, mines and other ammunition for these U boats. After Germany officially declared war on Holland in 1940, this supply freighter was scuttled by its German captain just off the coast of Aruba. Referred to as the “ghost ship,” it now rests off the coast of Aruba as a tourist attraction for divers. From his beach view home, Ed could watch as the wolf packs of Nazi UnterSee-Boots attempted to block the Allies from getting their oil through the blockade.

Ed retired at 52, after spending 30 years in Aruba. What are Ed’s secrets of longev-ity? He mentioned only his favoring the taste of oatmeal with bananas; although he admitted to smoking cigars and a pipe for a while.

Although Ed was once more physically ac-tive in the CFCS, he lets others do the planning and presenting now. (Bill Gates himself once ad-dressed the club.)

As computers go, five years is old, ten is ancient; thirty is positively prehistoric. The TRS-80s, Apple IIs, and Commodore 64s have all gone to computer museums, or have been scuttled like the Antilla. But not Ed Hillstead and the Central Florida Computer Society. You can expect both to last a lot longer; they grew up together.

by....Robert L. Black (Editor CFCS)
February 2008

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