I learned in the Bialik elementary school and in Tichon Ironi Alef high school in Tel-Aviv. I wanted to study History but didn't see any future in that so at the age of 18 I came to Haifa to study Physics in the Technion as an Attudai (pre-army student).
To help me finance my studies I wrote articles on Literature, Theater, Futurism and funny items. I kept doing it also after the end of my studies.
In 1960 I met Haya (Berger at that time) and we got married soon after.
In 1961 I finished my first degree I was sent by the army to teach Physics. In 1963 I came back to the Technion to do my second degree in Physics.
These were the first days of computers in Israel. The Technion got his first computer, I learned one course, then another, then everything I could learn on it. I joined the staff of the computer center and enjoyed it so much, I hardly bothered to hand my thesis and to accept my M.Sc. . I wrote new software (there was hardly any software at these days) and helped people find out their bugs. I also did some work in Numerical Analysis.
I participated in the fighting in the Six Day War and saw death come near me, but I survived.
A department of Computer Science was started in the Technion (the first in Israel) and I joined the staff, starting a Ph. D. project and helping in building the new department. Then I was asked to come back to the computation center, become the director and make it stand on its legs. I did that successfully.
After two years I looked for a new challenge, left the Technion, left Haifa with my wife Haya and my children Herzl (Tselly), Hamutal and Oren and came to Beer Sheva to build a new computation center in the Negev, i.e. in the Ben Gurion University. Four years I worked on this project and when the new computer was standing in the new building, I got fed-up with having to waste my time and my efforts on fighting the beurocracy of the university, I resigned my office as the head of the computation center but I was convinced by the new boss to stay and help him as a head of user-services department in the computation center.
I enjoyed doing that for several years. The Yom Kippur war made everyone anxious and willing to be active for this country. That took for most people half a year to dwindle. I kept going for several years with the same spirit. I joined the Civil Rights Movement (Ratz) of Shulamit Aloni and helped in organising it as a party with decision and execution bodies.
In 1976 I started FLUID/Mashov, a CAI project, one of the first in Israel and made it an effective educational system to help under-privileged children in the poor parts of Beer Sheva. Two schools were involved in that project, hundreds of children learning, and many teachers writing that course. (More on that in my professional life story.) I was active in many other pioneer educational projects. I started the the CAI special interest group, and kept as its head, arranging for meetings each month in a different place, introducing another CAI project, a group which later evolved to become the MOACH (Computers & Education) organisation.
In 1980 I designed and started POST, the first e-mail system in Israel. At first most people, including my boss, didn't understand why should they try using that strange thing called e-mail system and why is it better than the regular envelope and postman system, they were used to. It took us (me and the other people in the project) two years, to convince the people to join, and to make it a real communication system between the staff members of BGU. Then other universities started similar projects. Then IBM gave us a line to the States, and today it's a communication mode most people, not only in the universities, employ daily, without thinking about it, that I was there the first.
My family and myself joined the Eshel Abraham congregation, a Masorti (Conservative) congregation in Beer Sheva when it was started in 1976 and later I was elected to be the chairman of the congregation for two years.
After several years, the computation center became unpopular in BGU and most people wanted to close it down. Feeling uneasy with this atmosphere, I left it and joined the department of Mechanical Engineering.
All the time I kept teaching students, staff members, gifted children, teachers, teacher-teachers, high-school children, usually with little renumeration for that. All my lectures were about computers or education or both.
In 2004 I went on pension, closing all the courses and all the projects I was involved in, to write books in History and manage the BGU-RET, Computers & Retirees, an e-mail discussion group, as described in my home page.
Now there are Keren Shalom, Tomer Shalom and Guy Shalom, of which we are very proud grandfather and grandmother. I keep a diary with all their feats and ideas.
P.S. If you wonder about my picture, appearing in my home page, which looks strangely young for a
grandfather, the story is like this:
When I built my first home page, back in 1995, I had a tiny camcorder on my computer, which I used
to take my picture and put it in that home page. Then I sent e-mail messages to all my friends, telling
them I have a home page, with its address. A few minutes later I got a flood of urgent phone calls, all
with the same plea: "Please change this picture. It's so horrible, I won't be able to fall asleep tonight." I ran
home, took my picture from the time I had graduated the Technion, in 1961 and put it instead. That
stopped the urgent calls. After some time I went to the classroom, to teach my students about the Internet.
My home page was one of the
steps in that lecture. When the students entered that page, every student had a big smile on his face, from
ear to ear, because of the discrepancy between the young man in the home page, and the person standing
before them. So I decided to keep it, and have you laugh as well.
Do you want to say anything else?