High school nerd

1977

At age 15, I started to think about what I was going to do with my life. I knew that I loved comic books and computers. I couldn’t draw and it didn’t occur to me that comic books had writers. So that left computers. And I knew what people did with computers: they programmed them and made them do things. Math kinds of things. I liked math too! This seemed awesome. My destiny was clear: I would write computer programs, do math things, and live happily ever after, married to Barbara Schulman.

In high school, I got a chance to see, touch, and actually play with computers for the first time in my nerdy little life. My school, George Washington High School, had one of the best computer labs in the country. This was mostly thanks to the zealous leadership of Dr. Irwin Hoffman, an absolute force of nature in acquiring computing equipment for his students and then getting us to use it. Dr. Hoffman was also a tennis pro. And a wonderful all-around lunatic and a legend.

Knister at the Teletype. Keypunch machines at the back.

Dr. Hoffman was an incredible teacher, one of my favorites ever, even though he always called me “Knister.” He was usually frustrated with me, because I “didn’t apply myself.” Of course he was right. But I learned a ton in that computer lab, and a lot of that knowledge eventually paid off in my career and life. Oh, and I learned to touch type, a skill I’ve used every day for more than 50 years, including right now.

This photo was taken in our computer lab during my senior year of high school. Those are teletype machines going CHUGGA CHUGGA KACHUGGITA CHUGGITA that we used to timeshare with the school district’s computer downtown. In the back are two keypunch machines going THUNK THUNK THUNK that you could use to put programs on punched cards.

Every day or so, somebody took the punched cards downtown to be fed physically into the computer so the programs could be run. And then somebody brought the printouts back to our school on the next trip. This old-fashioned transportation system was affectionately called the Pony Express. So if you made a mistake, it could take a day or two before you found out. Then you had to fix the problem and try again. That’s why teletypes were so much better. You could screw up and find out immediately!