My First Encounter with a Personal Computer | Shohei Onishi (Dean, Graduate School of Health Management)
2007.01.11
"If you have time to study computers, you should be studying clinical medicine. You don't have that kind of free time."
I graduated from the School of Medicine in 1977, and I believe it was the following year that this happened. When Professor Hiroshi Sasamoto of the Department of Internal Medicine, Respiratory and Cardiovascular Medicine retired, the commemorative gift was a Casio pocket computer. This was an era when calculators for the four basic arithmetic operations were still very large, but this pocket computer could run BASIC programs. I joyfully used it for organizing my research data by manually inputting programs for calculating mean values, standard deviations, and tests for the difference between means. I thought it was revolutionary at the time. Around the same time, NEC released the PC-6001, and I used a classic word processor called Matsu on operating systems like CP/M and MS-DOS, but it was much faster and more efficient to write on manuscript paper.
Four years after graduation, I joined the Department of Internal Medicine, Respiratory and Cardiovascular Medicine. I chose to specialize in cardiac catheterization, a procedure where a tube called a catheter is inserted into an artery in the groin and guided to the heart to examine its size, movement, and the condition of the blood vessels on its surface. My supervisor at the time was Dr. Hajime Yamazaki, who is now the Vice-President. I felt it was necessary to create a database to organize the various information obtained from these catheterizations. Following instructions from Dr. Shinnosuke Handa, who was Dr. Yamazaki's boss, I began commuting to the Sunshine Building in Ikebukuro to learn the OS and Fortran language for a minicomputer from a company called DEC. I did this in my spare time between my busy clinical duties, but I suppose my clinical work suffered as a result. Dr. Yamazaki got angry with me, saying that if I had time to mess with computers, I should be studying clinical medicine. This has now become an amusing anecdote.
Why, you ask? Because when it comes to computers, I am now Dr. Yamazaki's teacher.
(Date Published: 2007/01/11)