Imagine, if you can, a world where no one owned an electronic calculator and few people had ever seen a computer outside of photographs or TV. I found out that

Imagine, if you can, a world where no one owned an electronic calculator and few people had ever seen a computer outside of photographs or TV. I found out that my high school's school district owned a computer at its administration building. It was 1967 or 1968. I decided to write a program and see if someone at the school district would run it for me. I picked up a book on FORTRAN (I still own it) and tried writing my first program. It was a disaster. After key punching the program on an IBM 026 keypunch machine (keypunch machines back then were mainly used for data entry, the parentheses, the equals sign, and the plus signs weren't even on the keyboard), I gave the deck of cards to a friend. He agreed to run it at the administration building, and the following week (one week turnaround time) I was informed that my program had syntax errors, :( Because of BASIC, my next attempt went much better. I realized I didn't know what I was doing, but I was able to find a book on BASIC and studied it carefully one weekend. BASIC was so easy to understand that I learned from that book how programs work. I didn't have BASIC available at the school district, but it had served its intended purpose--it explained programming to me--and armed with what that BASIC book had taught me, I went back to FORTRAN and successfully wrote my first program.