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The Early Days

It started in high school 1967-1968, There was the Engineering Concepts and Curriculum course. It was developed by the NSF and only, I think, 16 schools in the country participated. We got a bunch of stuff, an oscilloscope, a pair of analog computers, a bunch of boards with lights, relays, switches, and places to plug wires to connect it all, paper “computers”, and a teletype terminal connected to a real computer someplace else.

Played with the analog stuff.

With the relay boards we learned basic logic circuits. I could build and, or, and adder circuits. Built a bunch of adders that you could use to count up. Built an unstable circuit to act as input for the adder and you could watch the lights count up.

The paper “computer” let you write/erase grease pencil. There were a bunch of storage locations, registers, and an accumulator. You wrote a program in a simple machine code, use the bug (a cute piece of paper with a point you could stick in a hole next to the memory locations to keep track of where you were. You would do what the memory location directed you to. It was humbling to see all the ways you could screw up.

The teletype had one of the worst keyboards I have ever used. It also had a paper tape reader/punch. In class I learned basic. If you had an early personal computer with cassette storage the paper tape was a lot slower. The teacher also taught me a second year chemistry course and I used Fortran to do some of the stuff there.