My first experience with a computer

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 inadv…