Why I fell in love with the Mac - Part I - Earliest exposures to computers
From my 40th Anniversary of the Macintosh series
This is the first of probably four parts in my journey to embrace the Mac. In this article, I discuss my exposure to computers during the time before I had access to a computer on a regular basis, through eighth grade.
The first time I saw a computer was in summer school at Mae Murphy Elementary (today they would call it a “camp”) in Lubbock, TX in 1972. They had some kind of console with two two-digit numbers displayed in LED segments, and a punch card reader. The idea is you would feed punch cards with the sum of the two numbers being displayed, including a final card that said I am done with the answer. So, for example, if the displays were “13” and “85”, you would make a stack of cards. On the bottom was a 9, then on top of that was an 8, and then there was a card that wasn’t a number (who cares what it was? I don’t remember 50 years later). You would put the cards in the reader hopper, hit the read button, and the cards were read. If you answer was correct, a green light would light up. If you were incorrect, a buzzer would sound.
The other kids were underwhelmed, to say the least. But I was fascinated. I played with that machine until the teachers made me do something else. The idea of a machine that you could control somehow was very appealing.
My dad played bridge all of the time, and his favorite partner was a math professor from Texas Tech that I knew as Andy. Andy and a couple of buddies opened a computer hobbyist store in a strip mall on Slide Rd in Lubbock, kind of on the outskirts of town. I spent one afternoon there just watching Andy try to get some kind of early personal computer to boot. The computer was an open case with a whole bunch of wires in it. He had a bunch of magazines open, and was typing a lot of cryptic things into the attached keyboard, and the little TV was hooked up to it was displaying lot of numbers. I was hypnotized, and wanted to play with it, but Andy did not want me to until he got it to work. I had to go home before he managed it. I also remember the distinct smell of a soldering iron; my dad frequently fixed stuff around the house with one of those. For a budding nerd such as myself, this was all SO COOL…
We moved to Houston in 1974. My mother was shopping one day at the Rice Food Market in the Village near the Rice University campus. She saw a flyer for “Rice Summer School for High School Students” with a tagline that they were taking students entering 7th grade or later. So, she brought it home. My parents and I were fascinated and blown away.
I attended my first session summer of 1976. I took “Introduction to Computers”, “Probability and Statistics”, and “International Relations”. These courses were taught by Rice grad students. The same dude taught both the computer course and the probability course.
The computer course was an overview on computer architecture, and did not have any programming in it. They taught us what a CPU was, how memory worked, how the computer talked to disks and displays and keyboards, and showed us the basis of assembly language. I loved it. I went to the library (oh, man, the Rice Library. What a great place for a 7th grader), and browsed the computer section a lot (well, I hung out there a lot). I explored the place, and found a big computer room. An older gentleman talked to me about the computer he worked with, and then gave me a book on BASIC and a book on COBOL. I did not do much with the COBOL book, but I devoured the book on BASIC. Turns out, it was the original book on BASIC published by the guys at Dartmouth who originally created it in the 60s. Using that book, I wrote out computer programs on paper to do silly things like parse Morse code, or calculate prime numbers, or factorials.
The next year, I took a programming course, where they taught us FORTRAN. And we got to use a computer at Rice! At the time, the computer complex was in the Herman Brown building. You would go type in your program onto punch cards in the keypunch room, and when you thought you were ready, you would put your cards in the hopper, and press the button. You then walked down the hall, and waited in a big room that had a window where an operator sat, and a bunch of bins for printouts. You looked at all of the bins to see whether your program had run yet, and if it had not, you waited until the operator called your name as he took printouts and put them into the bins. The room had no chairs, so you just had to stand there. If the computer was particularly busy, the operator would tell you to come back in an hour or two. Edit/Compile/Debug cycles were slow!
I managed to complete the assignments we had pretty quickly, and the computer also had a PL/I compiler, so I played with that. PL/I at that point was baffling; you had to know things like how numbers were represented (what was the difference between Int16 and Int32? At that point, I had no clue, and you had to decide which one to use). And then I got to the part of the book that discussed pointers, and that’s when I decided I could learn PL/I later.
I also found the terminal room where they had terminals with the correct character set and keyboard for APL, a language designed around matrix algebra. I got to play with it that first time, check out a book from the library on it, and then type in a couple of programs a few weeks later to watch it work. APL’s keyboard requirement and specialization doomed it from general acceptance, but I had fun with it.
All of the students were provided accounts on these computers, and supposedly, we started with $25 in it. At the end of the summer, my account balance was about -$300, and I was really scared that Rice was going to come after me and my parents to pay up! They never did…
Towards the end of the summer, the grad students let me play with an interactive terminal, and I played a lot of a game based on Star Trek (you basically killed Klingons). A magical summer of computers. Oh, and I also spent a lot of time at the Rice Memorial Center playing Asteroids and Tank.
I attended the Vanguard Program (academically advanced magnet schools) at Lanier Junior High school (Walter Cronkite is a famous alum). My algebra teacher had a teletype in her room. It had a modem that used acoustic coupling, and would connect to a computer in Houston Independent School District. You would type on the teletype, entering commands, hit return, and the computer/teletype would print out the results on the paper roll. It had an American football simulation game, text-based, that I played for a while, but it was pretty easy to beat. (On offense, you ran on first down, and passed on second down. On third down you ran if there were less than five yards to go; otherwise you passed. You rarely had to punt or kick a field goal. On defense, you blitzed every down).
After I wasted yards of paper roll on that game, I started to type in BASIC programs. Initially, I had to type them from scratch every time I connected, and that got old fast, but then a friend of mine showed me how to save my programs using the paper-tape writer, and load them back into the system using the paper-tape reader. I accumulated a few rolls of tape with the same simple programs I always played with; my fascination with prime numbers was very strong as a young teenager.
They got rid of the teletype at the beginning of 9th grade, and replaced it with a personal computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II with a cassette drive. I’ll talk about that in Part II.
I am not trying to make a living with this newsletter, and I am not soliciting paid subscriptions, although if you want to pay for a subscription, I am not going to stop you. You just won’t get anything extra for it, at least at this point.
You can also directly donate if you want to.
Any and all financial consideration is greatly appreciated. And if you do donate, please let me know if I can mention you in a future newsletter. I won’t mention you unless you tell me it’s OK.