When asked to give this talk, it was requested that I focus on some on my historical experiences with computers. It reminded me of an old radio commercial in the days before TV (can you imagine a world without TV?).

The radio commercial was a Lucky Strike cigarette commercial. It seems they were interviewing some elderly tobacco farmer from North Carolina. He said, "I have been raising tobacco for nigh on to 40 years and I am here to tell you…" He goes on to say something about Lucky Strike tobacco.

I have my own version of that interview. "I have been in the computer business for nigh on to 43 years and I am here to tell you, … I am tired".

Until recently, I have meet very few people who were interested in computer history, particularly computer professionals. Perhaps one reason for the lack of interest is the computer industry is so new, there is not much history in which to be interested. Or, maybe computer history is just not interesting.

I was never much of a history fan myself. Perhaps it was from my formal school days when it seemed the only thing we had to be concerned with in history class was what I call the four W’s (What, Where, When, and Who). Probably more important things we should have focused on were "Why" and "How".

Recently I have begun to notice that more and more people and especially young computer professionals have a keen interest in the historical aspects of computers. At first I was surprised, what’s the big deal? Then I took a look back over my shoulder and by golly, there are some mighty interesting stories there.

I got into the computer business in 1957 quite by accident, as did many of my colleagues. We were sort of tripping along like Alice in Wonderland when we fell through the looking glass into the "Wonderland of Computers". Now that I think about it, maybe this would be a good theme for some future paper. We could illustrate computer history though the use many characters of the fairy tale. I am sure we could find the Cheser Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and so on in the computer industry. Wasn’t it the March Hare that kept chasing time, with the words, "I’m late, I’m late…"? Sounds very much like some computer project managers I know.

One of my colleagues at SOSU, Dr. Peter Macpherson, a young computer scientist, was keenly interested in computer history including stories of my life experiences with computers. I was honored when he asked if he could record some of my stories on videotape.

During the last three years while working as a consultant with IBM, I had the opportunity to tell many of my "IBM stories and early computer experiences " to young IBMers. They seemed to enjoy the stories of days of old and consistently advised that I should write a book capturing these life experiences. I have been capturing some of them on my Website and plan to add more. So when asked to give this talk and include some on Computer history, my first thought was – Computer History? Who cares.

But then, it is said that "history belongs to the victors".  It is also said, "those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."  George Orwell said, "Who controls the past commands the future. Who commands the future conquers the past."

My dear mom, bless her heart, was a very trusting soul. She used to say, "Son, if it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t be in writing." So, I was brought up to believe everything I read, especially in textbooks. Although, I think my father had some more sage advice. He said, "Son, believe nothing you hear and only half of what you read."

It was many years later that I found out that history books were only the author’s perception of the truth and what was written could be far from the truth. I recall studying about Columbus sailing the ocean blue and being afraid of falling off the edge of the earth because the prevalent belief in those days was the earth was flat. It was in my school textbook! Turns out that was not the case. Columbus knew the earth wasn’t flat. It was NOT the prevalent belief of the times.  Even the Greeks, years before Columbus’ time knew the earth was round. Remember Atlas, the Greek god who was he was singled out by Zeus for a special punishment and made to hold up the world on his back? Have you seen the statues? That world that Atlas is holding sure isn’t flat!

A link to a very interesting Website that addresses this Myth of the Flat Earth is:

http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html

Some history textbook writer decided to put the flat earth idea into his history textbook and future textbook writers picked it up and continued to include it in later textbooks. There are other examples of history books not being exactly accurate. I was taught that General Armstrong Custer was a hero. The books didn’t include the details of the "Battle of the Washita".

I have already begun to see inaccuracies creeping into computer history textbooks. An example that I have seen in recent computer literacy textbooks is that Admiral Grace Hopper was the "mother" of the COBOL language. Now I don’t want to detract from this pioneer in computer history. Admiral Hopper was a major contributor. She contributed significantly to the idea of higher-level computer languages and did develop some compilers. But, she was definitely not the "Mother" of COBOL. For scholars of programming languages if you study the syntax and language design of COBOL and COMTRAN you will find them almost identical.   COMTRAN (Commercial Translator) was IBM's solution to a higher level language for Commercial Application Programmers.   Several years earlier IBM had developed Fortran (Formula Translator) for the scientific community.

So, What was the first computer and who built it?

It turns out that this is more a question of definition than a question of fact. The computer, as we now understand the word, was more of an evolutionary development rather than a simple invention.

In fact if we look at the definition of a computer in a dictionary printed in the 1930s, we would find that a computer was defined as a person that computes. So, if I asked to go get me a computer, you would bring me a person that would do my computing for me.

Starting out as a side effect of war, computers have grown to become so totally integrated into our lives that we could not imagine life without them. At first thought of as a means of improving the accuracy and speed of mathematical calculations they have progressed to where they are emulating human thought.

We are reaching the stage of development where the new generations of computer scientists are unaware of their overall technological ancestry and the history of the development of their specialty. They have no past to build upon. New generations need to know enough about their history to protect themselves from it and not be condemned to repeat it. They need to use our history to their advantage.

The impact of the information revolution on our society and our industry is immense. In our increasing desire to control our own destinies, we try to understand not only our current technology, but also to look to the past to recognize trends that will allow us to predict some elements of the future. Looking backward to discover parallels and analogies to modern technology can provide us the basis for deciding whether or not to do something.

Asking as one who is approaching their allocated three score and ten, don’t we have a responsibility for preserving the achievements of the giants on whose shoulder we stand? Shouldn’t we be establishing archives and museums? I am delighted to report that there are many attempts to do so on the Internet. We would expect that visiting these archives and museums will yield a pleasure of discovery that is exciting and more than just mere historical reflection.

In 1956, universities and colleges had not yet included Computer Science and Information Technology in their curriculum. I graduated from Oklahoma State University in the spring of 1956 with a degree in mathematics. It was actually called Oklahoma A&M College then.

The story I like to tell is the summer after I graduated they discovered that old Larry Wilcox had somehow by mistake gotten a degree from there. Now universities don’t like to admit mistakes and so they decided that the only thing they could do was to invalidate my degree by changing the name of the school.

In addition to changing the name to Oklahoma State University, the math department got the first computer on campus. It was an IBM 650.  The IBM 650 had been announced in July 1953 as the IBM 650 Magnetic Drum "Calculator". It became the most popular computer of the 1950s.

Interestingly, in 1940 John Atanasoff the inventor of one of the first computers at Iowa State (The ABC "Atanasoff Berry Computer") had visited Tom Watson, Sr., head of IBM and suggested IBM get into the computer business.   Tom Sr. believed that computers would be in direct competition with his punched card accounting machine business. So, he turned John away. It was only the result of his son Thomas Watson, Jr. being able to convince his father that computers could enhance the punched card accounting machine business that IBM got into the computer business. Since the 1930s IBM had built a series of calculators in the 600 series that contributed to the versatility of the card processing equipment that was their major product.

The IBM 650 was an interesting computer that used a rotating drum for its memory.   The memory only stored digits using a strange binary-coding scheme called bi-quinary. Its memory size was 2000 10 digit words. Thus, it had a memory capacity of 20,000 digits.

Because of drum rotation, we had to strategically place the instructions on the drum to optimize performance. Later, we had an Assembler Program called SOAP (Symbolic Optimizing Assembler Program) that would optimize the placement of the instructions on the drum.

Ultimately, the IBM 650 was supported by a lot of other languages including Fortran.

The early IBM computers (701 and 702) were incompatible with the punched card processing equipment, but the IBM 650 used the same card processing peripherals thus making it upwardly compatible for many existing IBM customers. It also had a lot of bells and whistles added. Core memory, Tape Drives, Disk Drives, etc.

The 650 was the first computer to be mass produced, though IBM never expected to build nearly 2000 when it was announced.  The last IBM 650 was manufactured in 1962. It lived on in many customer shops for many years creating a service problem for IBM.

The IBM 650 Cost $182,000 ($72,800 with 60% Academic Discount). Considering inflation it would now cost $1,011,193.71 ($403,921.88 with 60% Academic Discount).

For many universities the 650 was to be their first computer. Its attractiveness was considerably enhanced by the availability of a 60% educational discount, conditional on the institution teaching certain computer-related courses. You see IBM saw that the lack of computer professionals would be a major deterrent to their growth in the computer industry. IBM paid for many academic programs to encourage the expansion of computer curriculum in academic institutions. I personally took advantage of some of these during my IBM career. Almost 50 years later we still have a shortage of computer professionals.

I had been a student instructor in the math department at OSU and so missed my first opportunity with computers by a month. I was to catch up with the IBM 650 a year later.

It is interesting to point out that the 650 did not have to ability to store alphabetic characters, only digits. So, it used a coding scheme of two digits for a single alphabetic character. Also interesting to note, the alphabetic characters were only upper case and a few punctuation characters such as a period or decimal point, comma and of course the currency character. Lower case characters were not to be supported by computers for another seven or eight years. I remember seeing a printer that was being used for word processing for the first time. To be able to print both upper and lower case characters slowed the printer down to about half its normal print speed. I thought it a terrible waste of computer resources. I never was too good at forecasting the future.

In the U.S. when I graduated from OSU (Oklahoma A&M) all able-bodied males had to serve in the armed forces for at least two years. You would be drafted into the army for two years or you could enlist for four years. You could defer serving in the armed forces by attending college and being enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC).   Of course if you attended a "Land Grant" college you had to take two years of ROTC. It was the first two years of mandatory ROTC that got me interested in a military career, so I graduated from Oklahoma A&M with a BS in Mathematics and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. An officer and gentleman by act of Congress.

My ambition was to be an Air Force fighter pilot and eventually a General in the United States Air Force. A high ambition for a farm boy from Russett, Oklahoma, don’t you think? Well, at this same time Stormin Norman Schwarzkoph graduated from West Point and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Two years later Colon Powell an ROTC graduate from CCNY was also commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and he became a four star general.

Well, after a few months in pilot training, the U.S. Airforce decided it would be cheaper for them and healthier for me if I didn’t fly airplanes. So, they needed to find me another job. As it turns out, out in San Bernardino, California the Air Force was putting together a project to develop a computerized ballistic missile logistic application system for the Atlas, Titian and Thor Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles. It was to be what we now know as a computerized automatic inventory control system. You know, when the number of atomic warheads was down to four, the computer automatically ordered some more.

Recall the cold war was very hot in those days. In fact one of the first and largest networked computer systems was the early warning system called SAGE which means Semi-Automated Ground Environment. Twenty-two interconnected SAGE centers were constructed in the United States and one underground was built in Canada. Radar inputs were brought in from all over the countryside over common telephone lines.

Meantime, here I am in Florida waiting for reassignment. We had been warned that if we "washed out" of pilot training we would probably get the scourge of all military assignments that of supply officer. One day I got orders to report to Mira Loma Air Force station in southern California. The orders did not say what my duties would be. When I went to headquarters to look up what they did at Mira Loma Air Force station, I found that it was a supply depot. For a guy that wanted to be a general, counting bed sheets was not an opportunistic assignment. I had two more years to serve my country, so in June 1957 off to California my wife and I go.

When I reported for duty, the receptionist said, "Oh, you are one of new Ballistic Missile Officers." Whew, didn’t sound like counting bed sheets to me. I later put together the following scenario. The air force in forming this large project of computerizing a ballistic missile logistic network decided that they needed programmers. I can imagine the scene as follows.

The air force being a very orderly institution has codified all job positions called Air Force Specialty Code or AFSC. So someone says, "Okay, we need computer programmers, what is the AFSC for a computer programmer?" On investigation, it was discovered that computer programming was so new that the air force had not come up with a job code for it. So, then the question was asked, "Well what job codes might make good programmers?" Answer, "Not sure, but people with math backgrounds seem to be pretty good programmers."

I had a mathematician’s AFSC, and I visualize an IBM punch card with my name and AFSC being run through one of those punched card sorters and my card falling into a hopper as a prospective programmer to go to California.

The air force at that time was beginning to computerize its logistics and was using UNIVAC computers, the first real commercial computer. By the end of 1952 UNIVAC had become the common name for a computer, just as Hoover and Kleenex became synonyms for vacuum cleaners and facial tissues. I once heard of an air force officer that called IBM and asked them to send him some information on one of those IBM UNIVAC computers. Kind of like calling up Ford and saying I would like to buy one of your Ford Chevrolets.

I was scheduled to go to a UNIVAC Programming class when the air force decided to switch to IBM computers because IBM could deliver sooner.

In those days you ordered your computer and delivery was a year or two away because it was custom built for you. (How would you like to order your PC and wait a year for its delivery?). What did you do for a year while waiting for your computer to be built and delivered? Well, you wrote and debugged your application programs. How did you debug your code without a computer? The computer manufacturers had a version of your computer at a data center and you got test time.

I recall getting 10 to 15 minute shots of "hands on" test time at the data center. Computer time was so dear that the data center had a cardboard mockup of the computer console, the card reader/punch and printer outside the computer room. The test team would practice on this mockup what they were going to do when they got on the real computer so as to maximize the small amount of time their were allocated.

As an aside, although IBM would like to call itself the father of computers, Remington Rand the company that made the UNIVAC was really the father of computers. The best IBM could claim was perhaps to be the uncle of computers. Interesting question of history, how come IBM came from behind to almost totally dominate the computer business? (85 to 90%) I believe one thing that contributed to IBM’s success was the UNIVAC required an electrical engineer to operate it. IBM knew because of their punched card business that the computer had to be simpler to operate.

History was to repeat itself thirty years later when IBM decided to enter the PC market after PCs had been on the market for five years. Then almost overnight, the IBM PC was the market standard. Remember IBM compatible? I recall trying to sell a PC to a lady here in Durant. She said, "I want one of those IBM Computers". I tried to convince her I could get her a compatible that was a lot faster and a lot cheaper. She became a little annoyed at me and said, "Look, I want the best! If IBM isn’t the best, why is everyone trying to be IBM compatible?" That taught me a lesson.

Back to 1957. The airforce scheduled me to attend a programming class for the IBM 650. The same model of computer that OSU had gotten in the math department the year before. However, as I finished my first programming class, the air force changed their mind and decided to get an IBM 705.  So, the following Monday, I went back to class to learn to program the IBM 705.

This was the first computer that I programmed. We programmed it in Autocoder or what we now call Assembler Language. It was a newer generation than the IBM 650, although it was still a vacuum tube machine as the 650, but it had core memory. The IBM 705 was the first commercial computer with ferrite-core memory.

It came standard with 20K bytes of core memory. Ours had 40K bytes of core memory. The bytes were six bit bytes and with an extra bit for a check bit, resulting in 280,000 cores. The core memory was visible in a glass case. It was a cube about 3 feet across. By 1976, 95% of all computer main memories consisted of ferrite cores. Which is probably why today you will still hear people (especially the old timers) refer to the computer’s main memory as "Core Memory".

The price per bit of core memory was 20 cents. This meant that our computer’s memory cost $56,000. Adjusted for inflation today that 40K of memory would cost $311,136.53 or about $7.00 a byte. Imagine paying $7.00 a byte for your PC’s memory.

Core memory has been in use until recently for special purposes, because it retains the information when the power is switched off, and it is resistant against radiation.

Now you may understand why we tried to save as many bytes as we could. This of course ultimately ended in an effort called Y2K.

It was one of the largest computers built at that time. We didn’t know how we were going to use all of that memory. The CPU speed was 17 MHz or .4 mips. It could do 400 multiplication/division operations per second. Compare that to our little ole PCs of today, 17 MHz vs. 400 MHz.

The IBM 705 cost $1,640,000. That was 1957 prices. Adjusted for inflation an equivalent amount of $1,640,000 in 1957 dollars would be $9,772,317.11 in 1999 dollars. Interestingly, if you adjust backward for inflation, that $2,000 you paid for an average PC today would have only cost you $335.64 in 1957 if it would have been available.

A typical 705 installation would be in a specially built room of perhaps 1000 to 2000 square feet, with a floor raised to permit interconnecting cables underneath. Substantial air conditioning was required to remove the heat. Along one or two walls would be line(s) of magnetic tape drives, each about 3 x 3 x 6 feet. Depending on the installation, there might be 4 to 8 transports on each of one or two "channels." The 1/2 inch tape had seven tracks and moved at 150 inches per second, giving a read/write speed of 15,000 six bit characters (plus parity) per second.

In the center would be the operator's console consisting of cabinets and tables for storage of tapes and boxes of cards; and a card reader, a card punch, and a line printer, each perhaps 4 x 4 x 5 feet in dimension.

The processing unit typically occupied a position symmetric but opposite the operator's console. Physically the largest of the units, it included a glass enclosure a few feet in dimension in which could be seen the "core" about three foot on each side. On the opposite side of the floor from the tape drives and operator's console would be a desk and bookshelves for the ever-present (24 hours a day) "field engineer" dressed in, you guessed it, a gray flannel suit and tie. The maintenance of the many thousands of vacuum tubes, each with limited lifetime, and the cleaning, lubrication, and adjustment of mechanical equipment, was augmented by a constant flow of problem reports, change orders to both hardware and software, and hand-holding for worried users.

The airforce built our computer room and our offices in an old fur vault warehouse where they had stored WWII flying clothes. There were several interesting things about this building. One was it had no windows. If we had a power failure, which we often had in the summer, we were in pitch darkness. Finally somebody got some flashlights for the supervisors and of course later they got some automatic emergency lighting.

This computer required special power and used motor-generators to protect it from power spikes. (A very expensive Surge Protector) I remember my first visit to the computer room. It was the first raised floor I had seen. Recall that the mainframe environment used raised floors so they could run cables under the raised floor to connect all the different boxes.

The thing that really convinced me that I had stumbled into a good career field was the air conditioning. Having been raised in the Washita valley where the summer temperature was often 110 degrees in the shade, the computer room was kept cold to protect the vacuum tube computer. There was a special cutoff switch on the computer so that if the temperature got above 75 degrees, it automatically shut down. Computers would have had a hard time using what I call Jimmy Carter temperatures. So, here we are with one of the largest computers the Air Force had. It had 26 tape drives, two drums, an 80 column card reader and punch, a printer, an electric typewriter as the operator’s I/O device, and 40K of core memory.

It required a room about this size to house it, special power and air conditioning and interestingly there was a small room in the corner where four or five customer engineers lived around the clock. It was their job to keep the computer running. Now compare that with today’s modest PC. No special power, no special air conditioning, we plug it into the wall and expect it to come up when we turn it on. We never turned the power off on the IBM 705 because it often would not come back up.

There was no operating system. Programmers had to write their own I/O error routines. Imagine writing a program for your PC and having to do also write your own Printer Drivers, Floppy Disk I/O routines, etc. All the programs were just batch.

Graduate Student – 1959

After programming the IBM 705 I signed up to go to Graduate School as one of the first Computer Science students at Stanford University. At that time very few Universities offered Compute Science curriculum. As far as I know there were only two, Stanford University and Michigan State. Then it was felt that the Computer Science field drew on so many different academic disciplines that a baccalaureate degree was not possible. The minimum would have to be a Master’s degree. Later pressure from industry drove the academic institutions to offer baccalaureate degrees in computer science. Over 40 years later and we are still short of the talent we need in industry.

I arrived at Stanford really anxious to sink my teeth into a new computer. When I walked into the Computer Science Lab, there was an IBM 650, the computer that I had just missed back at OSU three years before. I later had a chance to do some programming on a Burroughs 220 a new addition to the Stanford Computer Lab.

After completing my degree at Stanford, the USAF transferred me to the Pentagon where I was in charge of the System Programming Department for the USAF Computing Center. By this time the computers had been upgraded to third generation computers.

The IBM 7080 could run IBM 705 object programs without re-compiling. This was one of the first new model computers that was upward compatible with its older models. Up until that time you had to at least recompile your programs. Often you had extensive changes to your programs or you had to entirely rewrite them to fit the new model's architecture which might be quite different than the old model. 

Computers could only run one program at a time. This presented a real computer utilization problem. Remember the computer is so expensive that we must do everything we can to save storage space and processing cycles. Unfortunately, we still have this mentality today and see it in a lot of our computer curriculum.

Source data collection was primarily from punched cards. The source documents were keyed into punched cards and then were read into the computer to be processed. A very slow operation, at best 500 cards a minute. The processing resulted in having to punch more cards, the best at 250 cards a minute and print paper, maybe 300 lines a minute. A very wasteful thing to do with these big and expensive computers. The answer? Invent a small cheap computer to do these operations off-line. Results? The IBM 1401. The punched cards were written onto magnetic tape by the 1401 and the tape read by the big computer at a much higher speed. The big computer would process the data and produce more cards and reports on tape which was punched and printed off-line. This small computer had 1400 bytes of memory. The multiple and divide instructions were optional features.

IBM upgraded the 1401 family to larger family called 1410 and later 7010. It was here that I compiled my first COBOL program. A program with only 500 lines of code took over an hour. We had a ways to go.

Then deciding that computers were my business and not war, I resigned my commission and joined IBM and was part of the OS/360 COBOL Compiler design team.

It was the following year that IBM announced the S/360.   The S/360 a family of computers was a major move into the fourth generation of computers.  The generations being:

1. Electro-mechanical

2. Vacuum Tube

3. Solid State

4. Integrated

Key People in the design of the S/360 were:

Dr. Fred Brooks – Author of Mythical Man Month

Dr. Gene Amdahl – He later formed Amdahl Computer Company that reverse engineered IBM computers and cloned them to sell them for less than IBM's price. Tbese were the first clones. Interestingly, the Amdahl computer customer was to use the IBM OS/360 operating system which was considered in the public domain and therefore no charge.  This ultimately resulted in IBM unbundling their hardware, software and service.  On June 23, 1969 IBM announced this unbundling.  Up until that time all software was a no charge item and was considered by most as being in the public domain.

Dr. Gerrit Blaauw – Architecture Manager, principle designer of the S/360. Had major design on Stretch computer. Authored a book with Fred Brooks on Computer Architecture that provides a definitive guide and reference for practicing computer architects and for students.

Speeds

1945 - ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions per second, while current microprocessors handle 100 million per second.

1945 - EDVAC clock speed was 1 MHz. (John von Neumann’s computer)

1949 - EDSAC clock speed was 500KHz; most instructions took about 1500 ms to execute.

1949 - BINAC could do 3500 additions or 1000 multiplications per second.

1951 - IBM CPC adds figures at a rate of 2,174 a minute.

1955 - IBM 650 was capable of performing 78,000 additions a minute.

1955 - IBM 705 cycle time 17 microseconds (17 MHz) and was capable of 1,364,000 logical decisions a minute.

1956 - IBM 704 was capable of making 40,000 calculations a second, and adding figures at a rate of 1,496,000 a minute.

1959 - IBM 709 was capable of performing 2,496,000 logical decisions a minute.

1960 - IBM 7090 adds 13,740,000 figures a minute.

1968 - IBM System/360 Model 75 had a memory cycle time of 750 MHz.

I recall another colleague of mine at SOSU, Dr. Ronald Finkbine. Dr. Finkbine, a young Computer Science Ph.D., had had some industry experience. He came to SOSU around 1995. He began to prophesy the death of the mainframe. Come the year 2000 all mainframes would melt down because of the Y2K bug. I always want to point out that it was not a bug. A bug is an error in code. This Y2K problem was not an error in code. The programs were performing to specifications.

I left SOSU to return to industry to help with the Y2K problem. Besides making a lot of money, I felt that if I had help create the problem, I should help solve it. By the way, how did you like the way we solved it?  I recall several times in the sixties and early seventies as a programming manager having programmers come to me and say, "Hey boss, this ain’t going to work come the year 2000". Now my idea of long-range planning was what I was going to have for lunch.  So, I tole them to stop worrying and get back to work.

Who would have thought that in the late 1960s and 1970s the programs we were writing would still be in production in the year 2000? I did some Y2K work in Tulsa for SABRE, the American Airlines subsidiary. While crawling through some old PL/1 programs that was still in production I found one that was programmed in September 1968 and it was still in production..

No, the Y2K problem was a problem but I believed was no where near as serious as many believed. For one thing we have bugs all the time. When one is discovered, we fix it and press on. Probably one of the best things to come out of Y2K, in addition to giving some of us old codgers a chance to make money, is told by the following story that was on the cover of an IBM magazine called THINK.

THE FARMER AND HIS SONS

A FARMER, being on the point of death, wished to be sure his sons would give the attention to his farm as he himself had given it. He called them to his bedside and said and said, "My sons, there is a great treasure hid in one of my vineyards." The sons, after his death, took their spades and mattocks and carefully dug every portion of their land. They found no treasure, but the vines repaid their labor by an extraordinary and superabundant crop.

 

"Across the world there is a passionate love affair between children and computers.... I see the same gleam (as that of love) in their eyes, the same desire to appropriate this thing."(Papert, 1996, p. 1)

Seymour Papert is well known in the education field as he is in the computer field. He invented the program called LOGO to teach children how to program computers. The LOGO program is very interesting. It has a part called turtle graphics. A turtle lives on the screen. It has a pen on its tummy so it can draw if you make the turtle move. The only thing is that you have to tell the turtle in great detail how to move. The user gives these instructions interactively. For example, FORWARD 30. The turtle move forward 30 turtle steps and if you have told him to put his pen down, he makes a line 30 turtle steps long. There are a whole repertoire of instruction you can give the turtle. Another instruction might be RIGHT 90, which instructs the turtle to turn right 90 degrees. Thus very young children can learn the fundamentals of computer programming quite successfully.

Digital Divide

One room school house… The most effective education

Consolidation – more economical

Chemistry Labs

Physic Labs

Don’t need physical labs now. Using computers we can simulate what is learned in the physical labs, a lot safer, a lot quicker, a lot cleaner.

Price of gasoline? Village life. Business is doing it, work from home. Distance learn from home? Maybe not right away, but maybe back to one room schoolhouse using computers first.

Productivity

Tools like spreadsheets, word-processing, grade books, etc. Individualize reports to parents on student’s progress using databases and Word-processing mail merge.

Teaching

Drill – repetitive, something a computer is very good at.

Creative – Education programs that make you think.

Computers can enhance academic learning time by doing what computers do best:

They can perform routine tasks and thereby freeing teachers and students to engage in more profitable activities.

Individualizing instruction by delivering to specific information to the learners that need it while avoiding boring the students that don’t need it.

Provide opportunities for frequent interaction between the student and the learning materials to gain reinforcement and corrective feedback.

Serve as a presentation tool to facilitate large or small group learning.

Quality – Focus on subject at hand

While a student at OSU, we were required to type our papers.  We were allowed no more than three error corrections on a page.  I recall having laborously typed my way through three fourths of the page when I made my fourth typo.  I would remove the page and start typing from the beginning of the page.  This time I may only get one half of the way through the page when I made my fourth error.  Then starting over again, I might not even make it to half the page before exceeding the maximum allowed mistakes.  Now I contend that I wasn't learning anything while typing and re-typing the same thing.  My time could have been better spent focusing on the content of my paper and not the physical typing of it.  Of course now with wordprocessing this is possible.  The theory is that once you have pressed the correct key, you never have to do that again.

While attending Murray College, I recall several of my fellow students taking a   mechanical engineering drawing course.  I recall the  instructor's name was Mr. Courtney.  Now Mr. Courtney was a very strict instructor that demanded perfection from his students.  Some of the things he focused on was the drawing of lines that were the same thickness at the beginning of the line as at the end of the line.   This was accomplished by rotating the pencil as you drew the line.  And heaven help you if there was an eraser smudge anywhere on your drawing.  Well today, none of these factors matter.  Using computers for drafting, the lines are perfect.  No erasures to smudge.

So if computers are so good in education, why are they so slow in getting into the curriculum?

I believe the underlying reasons why new approaches are often in disfavor are enunciated clearly by Machiavelli:

I leave you with this challenge which is paraphrase of the song from the Hobbit movie.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A young man dies and goes to Heaven, where he finds he is
third in line at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter is taking a much-
needed break, so an angel is admitting the newly arrived to
Heaven.

The angel tells the three new arrivals that because so many
drug dealers and other criminals have managed to sneak into
Heaven that St. Peter must now be a little stricter with the
screening process.

Each person is required to state his former occupation and tell
his or her yearly salary.

The first man in line says, "I was an actor, and I earned $1
million last year."

The angel says, "Okay, you may enter." He turns to the
woman in line and asks her about her life.

She states, "I earned $150,000 as an attorney." The angel
thinks for a moment and then lets her in, too.

He turns to the third one in line and asks, "What have you
done with your life?"

The man replies, "I earned $8,000 last year . . ."

"Oh," the angel interrupts. "What did you teach?"