I was a very fortunate student going to a great high-school with the privilege of access to a IBM 1130 computing system on the second floor.

Once you showed the teacher you were competent, she gave after-hours access to the computer room and a bunch of us nerds hung out and learned to program. First in assembler, then in Fortran. If you were real good you got to switch the language pack in a large DASD (which was replaced by floppy disks). Only the teacher bootstrapped the computer with the paper-tape. As I recall she was worried we’d tear it. I learned to type on a keypunch in that classroom and to program. I made a personal swimming log program (I was a competitive swimmer) and I made a cribbage game I could play with the computer using dip switches on the console. Okay they were rudimentary but I was a programmer before push button telephones were common.

Even doing a project on your own, you establish programming styles and expectations so others can read and understand your code. My teacher insisted on commented code or you got a zero grade and she encouraged us to write the comments before the code … and remember, each line of code was a keypunch card back then.

Even when I got to University of Toronto, most of my class projects were done on keypunch cards. Only in my upper classman years did I use a PDP11 with VT100 terminals and 3270 green screen terminals with mainframes. In 1980 I got my hands on an Apple II and from that summer on, I’ve had personal computers in my dorm, home and office. I think I had the first PC in our dorm in 1980 and I did all my senior papers on that Apple II (yes, with the shift key modification).

If you’ve ever read the Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, you know about the 10,000 hour rule. Despite newer studies to the contrary, I still believe that rule to be true. I had more than 500 hours more than every other Computer Science student when I started College. By the time I graduated with 2 summer internships, I think I must have been close to 8,000 hours. I was promoted to project lead on a 50 person project when I was just two years out of school and by then I easily had 10,000 hours. I won’t go as far as to say I’m a Guru in anything but I am certainly accomplished, in part because some educator negotiated to get a computer put into our high-school and a high-school freshman nerd found his groove.