I grew up in Buffalo, NY, and it was the summer after ninth grade. During the summer my mother would sometimes take an art course. She loved art especially sculpture and painting. Some of which has been passed down to her grandchildren, but skipped me. It was a special vacation for her to do this. This one was somewhere in Vermont or New Hampshire and I think it was called “The Old Mill”. We did summer vacations like this several times around then. Another time we went to somewhere in Connecticut, because I remember the beach, the Long Island Sound and the name Brackman for that one. But back to the other…
My brother is four years older than me. At the time he was in college at Dartmouth College. It was a long drive there – over six hours to Hanover, New Hampshire. My parents dropped me off with my brother, and headed on their way to the art school for a week. I stayed in his dorm which was nearly empty and he settled me into an unused room. I have no idea what he was doing that summer, but some job I’m sure. He got me a job in the cafeteria. I scraped food off plates, and machine-washed dishes. Something I’ve never forgotten, nor ever want to do again.
In my off hours he gave me an id number which allowed me to use the campus computer. Down in the basement of the dorm was a terminal, actually it was a teletype. It was attached to the campus computer, a General Electric 235. He also gave me a programming manual. It was for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code by Kemeny and Kurtz, also known as BASIC. This was the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, and it was all very very brand new. It was the summer of 1963. Here was an environment where they wanted to make it easy for each student to access a computer. [Only later did I find out how special this was when I tried to program FORTRAN on an IBM 1620 using a two-pass compiler all on punch cards.] So I read the manual, ran existing programs – many of them games, printed them out, tried to figure them out, and in time I decided to write a program myself. By the end of the week I had written a program to find perfect right triangles, such as 3-4-5, 5-12-13 where the sides were less than 100. All this computer business left an impression on me. After this vacation I distinctly remember riding my bike (remember I was in ninth grade) over to a science fair friend’s home to tell him about it. Somehow I remember he was doing something with computers at the local university (University of Buffalo AKA SUNY at Buffalo) and I wanted to find out more. Little did I realize that this was the beginning of my career. Looking back the theme of my career has always been that it was more chance than it was choice, and your siblings have more influence on you that you’ll ever know. Thank you Bro.