ca. 1972 - Learning BASIC on your own at school

I was born in 1960. Somewhere in between 1972 and 1974, in 7th or 8th grade, Mr. Wentz at Ramsay Junior High in St. Paul, Minnesota, showed his class a teletype which was connected via dial-up to a centrally-located IBM time-sharing computer. Ramsay was an in-the-city Junior High; I don't think I would call it "inner city," but it was in the district next to the inner city junior high. I think I was in another class taught by a different teacher, and was getting the demo from Mr. Wentz, who taught 9th-grade algebra. Mr. Wentz had a reputation as being a very smart guy, so this was something of a big deal. He typed on the teletype, and it printed back. I was at the far margins of the crowd and really couldn't see so I had to listen carefully to Mr. Wentz. He said that he had "programmed" the computer in BASIC to compute the grade distribution for his class. It all sounded very interesting. When the bell rang it was the end of the day, and when all the kids left, I remained and asked Mr. Wentz if he could run the demonstration again, because I wasn't close enough to see. He said, "no, I have to catch my bus," but said that I could come in after school and try it myself. So on some subsequent day, I stayed after and he gave me this rather thick IBM manual (maybe two manuals, one for the system, and the other for the IBM dialect of BASIC), and said: go to it. I honestly have no idea why I wanted to do this, but there wasn't much else to do. I didn't know how to log in, enter a program, or run a program. He may have told me how to run his grade distribution program. Even typing on the teletype was pretty horrible, since "deleting" meant saying that a previous character would "be deleted" when the line was committed to the system; there was no "erase and overtype" functionality, and it wasn't until later that I was able to use a screen terminal. In any event, after trial-and-error over several days, I managed to write a program that would have a little conversation, on the order of: Computer: "How are you doing?" And the user could type in a response which would then be printed out. Doubtless the fact that my first program was about having a conversation says something about my relative degree of friendlessness in that era.

Before this, I am sure that I had never seen in person a computer, teletype or terminal. I know I had heard Spock talk to the computer on Star Trek, and I had probably started reading science fiction by this time, so I had some idea that a computer was an "electronic brain."

After that, I read a lot of books about computers. The best book on BASIC programming by far was called BASIC BASIC, and there was also an incredible book on games called Basic Computer Games by Dave Ahl. I also read a history of computer programming languages.

After the teletype programming on the IBM, Ramsay switched over to a different time-shared computer, a Hewlett-Packard 2000, which was a wonderful machine with a very rich version of BASIC. In 8th or 9th grade, I was able to participate in a programming tutorial of sorts conducted by college students at Macalester College; I learned FORTRAN on their IBM 1130 (data entry was through punch cards; they also had a Calcomp plotter). When I was in high school, the school district switched over to an awful Univac 1100 system, and eventually Macalester started using a PDP-11/70 (running RSTS/E), which is where I really learned how to program in a more sophisticated fashion in 11th grade, teaching myself assembler. It would be hard to convey how hard it was to teach myself assembler; even typing the right command to run the assembler and linker was hard to figure out. There was also a program with the Boy Scouts where I was taught some COBOL on an IBM 370 at Burlington Northern (the railroad computer). They had the gigantic "green screen" terminals. Somewhere in here I got to play on a "Plato" system (CDC's educational system).

Having said all that, the crucial observation would that none of this had anything to do with the personal computer; though, of course, I was treating every one of these computers as my "personal" computer (indeed, the IBM 1130, with core memory and a 2-ft. wide removable 5 MB disk drivem could only run a single job at a time, and had an APL keyboard to promote truly interactive computing).

A few more tidbits:

• When I was in 4th grade or so, I saw a desktop programmable HP calculator at my uncle's lab (he was a radiologist), but I don't think I figured out how to use it.
  
  
• When Ramsey switched over to the HP 2000, it started to have actual uses for the "business" of the school. The guidance counselor had some database he could log into, and I had to use the computer in his office. So there was some contention for resources between the kid hacker and the "real" users.
  
  
• Also in this era, I gained access to an account at the University of Minnesota's MERITSS system, which ran on a CDC Cyber 6400 or 6600 system, and provided timeshared access all over Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin. This was a very important system for kids, because it was possible to communicate through two chat systems. One chat system was called X,TALK and was very sophisticated, and the other was PPC ("port to port communication") by one Mick Huck. There was also an e-mail program written by a guy who used the handle Aragorn. A number of us in high school formed an informal group called "Various Users," and we all had secret handles. There must have been 20 people in the group. I think we swapped passwords quite a bit. We also wrote our own chat systems (I wrote one for the HP 2000). One of the best and most knowledgable of us was someone who used the Esperanto word "Knabino" (girl) as his hacker handle. He had long hair down to his waist and was sort of a high school hippie, or at least looked the part. Everyone was shocked when he went into the Air Force.
  
  
• Before 9th grade, my parents considered sending me to St. Paul Academy, though in the end we couldn't afford it. I remember vividly getting the tour of the high school, and seeing that they actually had their own computer room, which contained a few teletypes and an DEC 11/45. I am pretty sure I was distraught when it became clear I wouldn't get to use this fancy setup for the more well-off kids.

John