I learned how to program in 1968. My high school in Scottsdale, Arizona had a computer class. I didn't know about the class and didn't enroll in it, but I saw t

I learned how to program in 1968. My high school in Scottsdale, Arizona had a computer class. I didn't know about the class and didn't enroll in it, but I saw the Teletype in the corner of the math classroom and asked about it, and they let me use it after school. Dialup computer time was expensive; I think the school paid $30/hour - in 1968 dollars! So you couldn't just stay online and type in your program interactively. You would punch your entire program onto a paper tape and then feed the tape back through to print it out locally so you could check it. Then you'd dial up, feed the tape through again, wait for the results to be printed, and hang up. This video gives a pretty good idea of the Teletype sounded like. Listen to it with headphones or speakers turned up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObgXrIYKQjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObgXrIYKQjc Yes, it hummed like that the entire time it was turned on, and the keyboard and print mechanism were both loud. At a later job I had, you could tell when the mainframe went down because you could hear people up and down the hall bashing on their keyboards in frustration. A bell rang somewhere around column 72 (you can hear it in the video), and if you got to column 80 the print head would just start typing over the same spot over and over again. At the end of each line you pressed three keys to punch these characters onto your tape: Carriage Return, Line Feed, and Rubout. Carriage Return moved the print head to the first column, Line Feed advanced the paper, and Rubout was a character that was ignored by the print mechanism and by the computer you dialed up to. This extra character gave the print head and paper feed some time to catch up when you ran the tape through. Rubout was also how you corrected errors. Being character code 0x7F, it punched out all the holes in one row of the paper tape. Whatever other character was there before, it was now a Rubout. So you would hit Backspace to literally move the paper tape and print head backwards. Then Rubout to punch away the error, and start typing again. Of course you had a mess on the paper at this point (both your old and new characters printed at the same spot), but the tape would be OK. The next summer I got a job at the timesharing company the school used, and it was an amazing experience to type in a command and get a response back from the computer within a few seconds, without having to worry about the cost of being online. My official job title that summer was "Night Operator". That way they only had to pay me $2/hour. But it was OK, their timesharing service shut down at night and I got to do whatever I wanted with the SDS Sigma 5. I found the Algol 60 Report and the the assembly language manual and went from there. It was my first personal computer!