Well, now that we've devolved to swapping histories: I first used a keypunch when I was four, in 1965. My dad rented one and had it installed in the house because he was working on a concordance program. His first project was Beowulf, and he needed the text to be input, which my mother volunteered to do (or for all I know, he paid her out of some grant). https://www.amazon.com/Concordance-Beowulf-Jess-B-Bessinger/dp/0801404800 was the result (note that B comes before S, so it's listed under his collaborator's name but you can see "SMITH" on the spine in the picture). That was on OS/360; he ported the program to VM, and when he retired in 1989, he rewrote it from PL/I to C on Windows.
One result of that concordance is that there's a line in Woody Allen's Annie Hall where she says she's thinking of going back to school, and he says, "Just don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf!" It's a throwaway line, but my family finds it inordinately funny, since we lived with that project for a half-dozen years. A decade after the Beowulf keypunch, I sat in on my dad's PL/C introduction to programming at University of Waterloo, where he taught, the summer after my 8th grade. Kind of a big deal-kids didn't generally get to touch computers in 1975! And I remember a friend-a bright guy-who asked me what the computer's voice sounded like. I had to break the news to him that we were still using cards. Too much Star Trek. That was the year after I'd started playing a SUMER game via dialup (300bps, I think-possibly 110) on my dad's VM/370 account. In that game, you were king of Mesopotamia and had to manage the grain harvest: so many bushels for food, so many for bribing the barbarians, etc.; you could also buy and sell land. But it only let you play for either 2 or 3 "years" (harvests), which was profoundly unsatisfying. Once I found that the EXEC that invoked it issued a command against another file, which comprised a semi-English-like language, I tinkered until I had a version that would ask you how many years you wanted to play for. My first hack! Nowadays, of course, I would have contributed it back to the U, but back then it honestly never occurred to me. And I've looked for but not found SUMER. I think it was years later that I realized the language was BASIC. Not sure I've written any actual BASIC since, though I've tinkered with VB and VBS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
