$ and Typos

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission


I went through the seventh grade in the booming metropolis of Red Wing Minnesota. One fateful day in December of 1972, our junior high school had…

… for one day only…

…a ….

…COMPUTER!

Yes Red Wing, a little town you’d miss if you blinked, and wouldn’t miss if you’d knew what it was like to live there, had a computer for one entire day. There were no parades or fanfare, but that was because computer time was too expensive to waste on such frivolities.

Our science teacher was in charge of the computer, a responsibility he took as seriously as if he held the single key to the vault at Fort Knox.

Each and every one of us in the seventh grade was going to get some “processing time” on the COMPUTER.

Whether we wanted any or not.

I spent my day with the all the aplomb of a 12 year-old in a waiting room while the dentist readies for a root canal. Each hour of the day, as we started another class, the COMPUTER mantra was repeated again and again.

“COMPUTER time is expensive! When you are selected you must spend as little time with the COMPUTER as possible! We only have the COMPUTER for a day and we need to process all of you!”

I wasn’t sure what was involved upon selection, but being processed through a machine didn’t sound like an enjoyable activity.

I was in math class, studiously ignoring theorems and other hieroglyphics when my number came up. The science teacher opened the door to the classroom and called my name in sonorous tones. James Cagney was summoned to the last mile in Angles with Dirty Faces in just the same way. I was told to leave my books at my desk, as I “would have no further use for them” where I was going.

The hallway I had walked (and occasionally run) a hundred times before now seemed to stretch out endlessly. White tiles, flickering florescent lights and regularly spaced, unmarked doors seemed more … well … institutional than ever.

My teacher walked beside me, keys jingling echoes against the unbroken walls, interspersed only by our footsteps.

We arrived at a door in the corner of the building. This door had never been opened in the entire six months I had attended this school. There were schoolyard rumors and stories about what was hidden behind there, none of them ended well.

The keys that had called out our progress down the hallway came out and with a flourish, he fished the correct one from thirty of its identical companions. The door opened and with a squeal of rarely used hinges harking to the Inner Sanctum, I saw – a room.

That was it. A room. A blinding white, flickering light, empty, sterile, musty smelling expanse of… emptiness.

Set halfway into the room, it’s short edge flush against a wall, was a small table and one uncomfortable, too-cruel-for-the-Spanish-Inquisition, straight-backed wooden chair. I was walked toward this and as I grew nearer, I realized that what I thought was a table had little letter buttons on it like a typewriter.

All this hoopla over an electric typewriter? My mother had one of those! This monstrosity was nearly as long as I was tall and looked like it weighed more than my brother’s motorcycle. Why lock the door? Who ever could walk out with this under his arm wasn’t going to be deterred by a little lock!

“Sit”, I was instructed. I sat. I stared at those keys and panic started to bubble up. I wasn’t allowed on Mom’s typewriter, it was too expensive (I kept breaking things). The old manual typewriter I was allowed to use, I hadn’t. I had no idea how to type. I always figured it was a skill I would never use anyway, like algebra.

“The COMPUTER is in Minneapolis,” I was told, “at the university. “COMPUTER time is expensive and they can’t even accommodate their own students, so you better make this fast.”

Then, just to be sure that I fully understood the pressure, “And this is a long distance phone call too!”

Now sweating bullets, I offered my place in the limited COMPUTER time go to some one else. Anyone else.

No, this was required as a COMPUTER class.

Joy.

He dialed an ordinary phone and listened for a few moments. Suddenly, and without warning, he jammed the phone into this typewriter table - into a rubber piece that looked like it was made for the receiver.

“Here,” a piece of paper was thrust into my hands, “type this in – Quickly – Quickly!”

I grabbed the page, laid it next to the keys and stopped cold. What was on the paper looked like something I might have written on Mom’s old typewriter if I were wearing mittens and not looking.

“PERFORM, ACCEPT, Display”

“NO! ALL CAPITALS! – Just like on the page! Start again!”

PREFORM

“NO! Start again!”

I finally got all way to the end of the list, though by this time I was sweating so much the wooden chair beneath me was beginning to rot. I did it! I got it all! Only one line left!

STOP RUM.

“NO! Not RUM! RUN! “N”! NOT “M”! START OVER! YOU’RE WASTING MONEY! HURRY, HURRY, YOU’VE BEEN HERE TOO LONG AS IT IS! WE HAVE TO GET ALL OF YOU THROUGH THIS IN ONE DAY! DO IT AGAIN!”

Having a livid science teacher, snow blindness from faulty florescence lights bouncing off of a white tile floor and a keyboard where the letters weren’t even close to alphabetical order started to take it’s toll.

In a panic, I repeated the pig-latin-nonsensical random collection of letters, I check and rechecked as I hunted and pounded each key individually as they made their little gunshot noises, while a livid teacher paced the room like a angry, trapped cat.

Finally I had it done, there may have been one or two typos, but as my instructor said – “We’ll have to live with it, THERE’S NO MORE TIME!”

I had written my first computer program. HE ran it, as I could no longer be trusted to press the right buttons. Out of the middle of this typewriter table, a sheet of paper started to blossom with all the sounds of a derailed train as the entire assembly began to shake with the effort of the extraction .

On this piece of paper was the following result of my ordeal. It read as follows:

X
XX
XXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XX
XX
XX

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

That was the end result of the first program I ever wrote. I knew then that computers were simply not practical nor were they particularly useful.

I also realized that whatever the future of these overblown-over-hyped-useless machines, they would not, in anyway way involve me.

---

Oh, by the way, on an unrelated note:

I just had an anniversary of sorts.

I’ve been a programmer now for ten years.


...sigh...