What I Worked On

February 2021

Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school,
were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what
beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still
are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot,
just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them
deep.

The first programs I tried writing were on the IBM 1401 that our
school district used for what was then called "data processing."
This was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14. The school district's
1401 happened to be in the basement of our junior high school, and
my friend Rich Draves and I got permission to use it. It was like
a mini Bond villain's lair down there, with all these alien-looking
machines — CPU, disk drives, printer, card reader — sitting up
on a raised floor under bright fluorescent lights.

The language we used was an early version of Fortran. You had to
type programs on punch cards, then stack them in the card reader
and press a button to load the program into memory and run it. The
result would ordinarily be to print something on the spectacularly
loud printer.

I was puzzled by the 1401. I couldn't figure out what to do with
it. And in retrospect there's not much I could have done with it.
The only form of input to programs was data stored on punched cards,
and I didn't have any data stored on punched cards. The only other
option was to do things that didn't rely on any input, like calculate
approximations of pi, but I didn't know enough math to do anything
interesting of that type. So I'm not surprised I can't remember any
programs I wrote, because they can't have done much. My clearest
memory is of the moment I learned it was possible for programs not
to terminate, when one of mine didn't. On a machine without
time-sharing, this was a social as well as a technical error, as
the data center manager's expression made clear.

With microcomputers, everything changed. Now you could have a
computer sitting right in front of you, on a desk, that could respond
to your keystrokes as it was running instead of just churning through
a stack of punch cards and then stopping.
[1