[kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..

[Doug Moen]

In 1975, it was difficult for a 14 year old to get computer access. I lived in Scarborough and hung out in Toronto with a computer club of like minded teens (The Toronto Computer Society I think?), led by an older student, Taras Pryjma (sp?). He was socially connected and knew how to get free computer access from all of the Toronto universities.

George Brown College had a public access computer room full of ASR 33 Teletypes (110 baud) and Decwriters (300 baud), which were printing terminals with auxiliary paper tape punches and readers. The computer was running Dartmouth BASIC, which was an early example of an interactive computing system. There was a certain amount of shared storage for saving BASIC programs and running them, and you could also punch your programs to paper tape and load them later. This was my first programming experience.

Scarborough College had interactive APL terminals, and APL was a far cooler language than BASIC. I did have to purchase my own APL typeball, because these were subject to wearing out and were not provided for free.

Beyond this, I also had access to batch computing systems at several university sites -- I could use a card punch to punch a deck of cards containing my program, load them into a card reader, run a job, and get a printout of the program results later. I recall writing programs in Fortran, PL/I and Algol. By modern standards, PL/I was the best language of this group -- it supported structured programming and data structure definitions, unlike BASIC or APL. But it was super verbose compared to APL, and it was punch cards. Not sexy.

I think I ended up writing about 50 pages of APL as a high school student. Despite what people say, APL was simple and easy to learn, and it had more power than I knew how to use as a teen.