Summary: In This Episode: When sizing up someone in a modest profession, don’t make the mistake of thinking the job title defines the person or their abilities. They might just surprise you with an overabundance of Uncommon Sense.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * A brief bio of Reynold Johnson published by the IEEE Computer Society, when he was given 1987’s <a href="https://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-reynold-johnson">Computer Pioneer Award</a> for RAMAC.<br> * See several more photos, below.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> Way back in 1998, when the Honorary Unsubscribe first got started, they were very brief writeups, capturing just a few well-known features of the honorees’ lives. Actor Jack Lord, for instance, the first Honorary Unsubscribe honoree — his writeup just mentions “various films” and then the role that made him a star: “Steve McGarrett” in 12 years of the TV series Hawaii Five-O. That took less that 50 words, including the date and cause of death!<br> But there’s another guy that has always stuck in my mind, even though I summed up his life later that same year in just 118 words. You’ll soon understand why I’ve remembered him for 20 years now. As I thought about him recently, I wanted to know what brought him to the place where he was — a place that made him stand out even with the few details I knew that led to my answer anytime someone asked me which of more than one thousand Honorary Unsubscribe honorees stand out for me the most.<br> And that would be Reynold Johnson, or Rey to his friends.<br> Rather than read you that way-too-terse summary from 1998, I decided to research him more fully so I could understand how he got to where he was and, since I did that, take the opportunity to tell his story to the world more fully right here and now.<br> Born in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants, Johnson went to a private Christian school, perhaps for his entire 12 years of basic schooling, and he seems to have liked it: he then went to the University of Minnesota for his bachelor’s degree in Educational Administration, and became a high school science and math teacher in Ironwood on the western tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the border with Wisconsin. Today, the town has about 5,000 residents.<br> At that time, there was a great new innovation in teaching developed by Benjamin Wood of Columbia University, something that totally changed the teaching profession. Let’s see if you can guess what Wood invented. Was it a) the intelligence test, b) standardized textbooks, c) recess, or d) the multiple-choice test? It seems weird to us today, because it seems so obvious now, but it was the multiple-choice test: he invented it in about 1929.<br> The problem Dr. Wood found, though, was it was time-consuming to score the tests. You’d think it would be easy compared to grading the hand-written answers to various questions, but remember we’re talking about mass education here: thousands of schools jumped on the multiple choice bandwagon, and something easier was needed for the scoring.<br> Wood appealed to many office machine companies for help, and only one responded: International Business Machines. IBM president Thomas J. Watson Sr. authorized company engineers to design a machine, which takes us on another tangent.<br> In the late 1800s, Herman Hollerith perfected something that was first invented in 1725 to record data by punching ...
