The Question and Answer Board

[NorthWesterner]

I go back just a year after 1971.

In 1972 was hired to teach English and math at a high school in NY. When I got there in September I was told I was also assigned to teach computer programming. I had never seen a computer in my life. But one of the school's parents was an IBM fellow and was working on how to integrated computers into the schools, so he gave us a printer/ terminal, phone line, modem (not what kids nowadays think of as modems -- the kind where you had a normal phone, dialed up the computer, then put the handset into the modem, which had two foam lined spaces for the phone mouthpiece and earpiece), and unlimited access on the mainframe, can't recall now whether 360 or 370. I cracked open my APL book two days before I started teaching. Well, they say the best way to learn something is to teach it, and that was for sure the case with me!