Replies to post #9029 on The Question and Answer Board (IHUB)

[Chas]

Further proof of my dinosaur credentials. That same year of Fortran IV, Engineering students had to have a sliderule. My brand new latest greatest HP-400 calculator with 9, count em, 9 memories, was not allowed for tests and exams. The memories were an unfair advantage because evil people could store constants and bringing notes to tests was a no-no.

Two years later, scientific calculators were required and slide rules were out. I learned then about the suffering of a pioneer. Probably saved a lot of Phillipine Mahogeny trees from an early death.

[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!