Wow. Back in the spring of 1971, thanks to NSF a number of high school students and teachers, I one of the former, got to go for a few weeks to the University o

Wow. Back in the spring of 1971, thanks to NSF a number of high school students and teachers, I one of the former, got to go for a few weeks to the University of Oklahoma where Dr. Richard V. Andree would lecture us on BASIC programming and the fundamentals of numerical methods on Saturdays and then on other days through the week we each got our hands on an ASR-33 hooked up to a Data General Supernova that could have four people running the BASIC interpreter at a time (!). After that, I kept a notebook that I would write programs in in BASIC with no chance of running them and sucked down the computer-related books in the school and town library, including one English book with such exotica as Extended Mercury Autocode. After a junior year with no computer access, vo-tech school exposed me to unit record machines and an RCA 301 (ended up writing self-modifying code to do a decimal multiply) and eventually RPG on the OKC public school system's 370. On to OU, where the undergraduates all had to use punched cards--it was an IBM shop, so it was the horrors of JCL again, though I hadn't seen anything else but the Data General, so I didn't know any better. Very different days those were.