I learned to program in 1970, at age 12, when my stepfather, a physicist, took me to his office on Saturdays, sat me down at an ASR-33 Teletype, handed me the m

I learned to program in 1970, at age 12, when my stepfather, a physicist, took me to his office on Saturdays, sat me down at an ASR-33 Teletype, handed me the manual for Basic on a GE Mark V timesharing system, and let me do what I wanted. After a while they switched from the Mark V service to a company called COMShare, whose timesharing system ran on an SDS 940. They had several languages on this machine -- Fortran IV, I think, which I started to learn so I could help my stepfather with his numerical codes; Snobol, which I didn't do much with; a long-forgotten language called CAL, which I learned much later had been created by Butler Lampson of PARC and Alto fame; and a macro assembler. I'll never forget opening the macro assembler manual and seeing an example that started: MUMBLE MACRO I don't think I figured out at the time what a macro was or that that this was a declaration of one, and its name was "mumble". Nor did I quite realize that "mumble" was just a common metavariable. These mysteries were revealed later in my education. A couple of years later, my stepfather's company switched to using a CDC 6400 via a remote batch terminal, consisting of a card reader, a line printer, a CRT console, and a 9600 bps modem -- many tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, I'd guess. The CRT display would sometimes go on the fritz. I figured out where to hit it with my hand to make it come back on. I got pretty good at Fortran and started to learn to read the 6400's assembly language. At one point I started to study the optimizing Fortran compiler's output. This made a great impression on me as I couldn't imagine how it did some of its optimizations. To me, then, that was AI.