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In the mid-Seventies, the era the OP was talking about, the only way a kid could access computers was at school, and pretty much only high schools had them avai

In the mid-Seventies, the era the OP was talking about, the only way a kid could access computers was at school, and pretty much only high schools had them available to students. The computer would typically be one single minicomputer or a timeshare terminal. His school had both (he was lucky). The teacher was the gatekeeper and decided who had access. Back then, there was no way to start programming at 9 or 10. It took a lot of dedication to learn programming. You'd have to wait in line with a bunch of other students to submit your program on cards or paper tape, run it once, debug and fill out new cards, and repeat the next day. The output would be printed on paper (no video). I wrote a blackjack program, but the teacher wouldn't let me run it because it was too interactive. He wanted us to write batch processing programs that calculated water bills. It was a big reason why I stopped programming and didn't come back for 15 years.

crag 13y ago
Actually there were PC's in the 70's. But they weren't cheap. I had a kit; a Heathkit I built with my grandfather. Much cheaper then the Apple's or other systems available then. And man did I learn a lot building that thing.
walshemj 13y ago
Which is how I did it back in 74 though we had to learn a assembly language CECIL which we wrote out on coding sheets and sent off to a batch system to be processed. And this was the CSE stream class for those of us not considered good enough for O levels - ironically as I was in the CSE class I wasn't allowed to take the Computing A level in the 6th form.
cpncrunch 13y ago
Yes, you're right. I started coding when I got a Sinclair ZX81, back in 1981. At that time there were lots of really affordable computers starting to come onto the market, but previously it would have been difficult to learn to program unless you had access to university data centre.

crag 13y ago

Actually there were PC's in the 70's. But they weren't cheap. I had a kit; a Heathkit I built with my grandfather. Much cheaper then the Apple's or other systems available then. And man did I learn a lot building that thing.

walshemj 13y ago

Which is how I did it back in 74 though we had to learn a assembly language CECIL which we wrote out on coding sheets and sent off to a batch system to be processed. And this was the CSE stream class for those of us not considered good enough for O levels - ironically as I was in the CSE class I wasn't allowed to take the Computing A level in the 6th form.

cpncrunch 13y ago

Yes, you're right. I started coding when I got a Sinclair ZX81, back in 1981. At that time there were lots of really affordable computers starting to come onto the market, but previously it would have been difficult to learn to program unless you had access to university data centre.