Tech Reflect
  • Home
  • About This Site
  • Contact me
  • Search Icon
My first experience with a computer

My first experience with a computer

2019-05-14

My school district offered interesting summer courses ranging from pottery to magic to computer programming. I never took pottery but I took the other two.

The summer before kindergarten I signed up for the computer programming class. Everyone was within a few years of my age so it wasn’t like I was some crazy prodigy or something.

Turns out we only had one computer (a mainframe), a keypunch, a punchcard reader, and a printer. I didn’t know what to expect so it all seemed pretty cool to me.

We learned BASIC and set to work on writing a short program. I decided I wanted to ask the computer for the size of a baseball field and have it print out the answer. I showed my program to the teacher and he told me I needed to add a line of code to print out the answer.

I was deflated. The computer doesn’t know? It was one of those anti-AHA moments where everything I thought computers could do suddenly exploded.

(As an amusing side note, I kept my program and showed it to my brother later. I had inadvertently wrote the question as “How size is a baseball field?” which I got teased about for about 40 years.)

So, I added the line that would display the size of the baseball field, put in my cards into the punchcard reader and got my printout. No bugs! Worked great on the first try.

This success was never repeated in my life.

Related Posts:

  • How I ended up in California
    How I ended up in California
  • How I almost worked for Pixar
    How I almost worked for Pixar

personal

Post navigation

NEXT
Nose hair trimmer for the apocalypse
PREVIOUS
Project Papercut

Get Monthly Updates

Recent Posts

  • Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian to the rescue?
  • “Why does Mail have to be so fucking complicated?”
  • This mouse has no tail!
  • Interview feedback and the Thumb-o-meter™
  • Buy a cactus, get hired

Categories

  • analog (1)
  • apple career (11)
  • apple inside (11)
  • apple stories (17)
  • bertrand serlet (3)
  • essays (15)
  • geeky (21)
  • interviews (4)
  • iOS tips (3)
  • Mac OS X (2)
  • macOS tips (37)
  • personal (7)
  • products (4)
  • scott forstall (7)
  • scripting (1)
  • steve jobs (14)
  • tim cook (1)
  • workplace (14)

Get Monthly Updates

About cricket


Me with Guiness the owl

25 years in tech. I like to write manifestos. I like to offer interesting tips. I like making fun of things. Everyone copes differently.

My Other Blogs

  • Free Range Parrots
  • Plucky Tree (personal)
© 2022   All Rights Reserved.