The town had never owned a computer. This was the first. We were to test it.
It was a blank slate, awaiting programming. As were we. Lacking teachers and role models, we sought our own way.
At 2am, the lone light of our schoolroom drew a whistle from outside.
“What are you boys doing in there?” called a policeman.
“Come see.”
He entered nervously, puzzling at the spectacle.
“We’re assuring the random number generator is fair,” we explained. The birth of a new industry was so engrossing.
Later, we noticed he’d gone.
Our first lesson over, we’d discovered programmers are nocturnal.
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rated!
Well done, Kent.
Thumbed.
In my case, I later attended MIT and they spent no time at all preparing me for the business world, they seemed to think the technical world was all there was. They would probably make some feeble defense about how I should have taken business courses if I cared, but my point is that it was not obvious to me until later that knowing how business affects one is as important as knowing how politics affects one, for example. One doesn't just take History or Social Studies if they want to be President, one also has to do it in order to be a citizen, affected by political policy. For a person studying technical subjects, it is not a luxury to understand the basics of business and the economy, since it affects anything from funding to the set of opportunities to do something for the world to correct choices of careers to how to cooperate with others in your company once you're hired somewhere.
There was not much commercial business in computers a that time but MIT could have made the reasonable assumption that the birth of a new industry would lead to a truckload of new businesses and made a special point of telling its [undergrad] students how to prepare to deal with such a scenario. It didn't. Hopefully it has improved in the interim. But students starting out would be well-advised to make sure to fill this gap in their studies even if their college doesn't require it. A favorite quote of mine, about poker but applicable in other areas: "If you don't know who the fool is at the table, it's you." The same might easily be instructive to people who work for a company but don't understand business, who live in a democracy but don't understand politics, etc. One needs to know what one can/should/must affect, and what one cannot.
Do you think programmers and writers are nocturnal because the nighttime allows us the necessary hyper-focus? that's my theory, anyway.
I think that's the initial reason.
A year later, my mom would see me up late and say "go to bed and get up early to do your work when you're rested" and I learned to understand that while that might work for her, it wouldn't for me. She was legitimately less stressed on a full night's sleep, while I was less stressed if I had a buffer of time I could draw from if needed. If I slept first and got up to find I needed extra time, there was nothing to take it from, but if I waited to sleep, I could sleep one hour less and still get all the time I needed for my project. So I stayed up. Stress, I think, isn't just caused by how much you have to do but by your own subjective impression of how much control you have over it.
I'm still collecting. This one definitely has to go up. Friday, I promise.
You might like this post of mine, geek to geek. Or not.
When I Was Walter Cronkite's Favorite Keek
I should say, given your other story, there is a slight place where I bent the truth in the story I wrote here and should probably add some disclaimers about it being nonfiction. There was actually exactly one other computer already in our town, but pretty far away, and it was an IBM 1130. Our school would make us use coding sheets (kind of like graph paper, where you fill in one letter per box, saying what you want punched onto cards) and then someone across town would type in the coding sheets, run our program, and then return it to us a couple days later. (The response usually said "syntax error" because there were typos when they transcribed our sheets.) I'd just taken a typing class, so I knew how to punch my own cards and I could get myself across town to where that other computer was and have them run my deck before they shut down at 5pm. (The 1130 had to "rest" at night, just like people, I was told.) So the computer had seen this other computer, but the programming we did on it was so feeble I didn't count it. Assignments were things like "compare two numbers and type a digit 1 on the operator console or line printer if the first is bigger than the second, otherwise, type a digit 0. The story above takes up when someone finally got us our own computer, a personal computer, not with a card deck. And with 8K of RAM memory and BASIC on ROM. (We kept trying to escape BASIC but found no way out.) There was probably a computer culture for using decks of punchcards by people with pocket protectors that I wasn't part of, but in 101 words I couldn't afford the complexity. So I stripped it down to just discussing what amounted to a personal computer and the new culture of interactivity. I had that very minimal FORTRAN experience going into the stuff about BASIC. What was really true though was the blank slate part. We had no teacher assignments, we were just thinking up things to try, reading occasional stories in magazines about what others had done, and wondering what we could do.