@bplus : You had to wait until college for the "Hollerith card" experience? I got that in high school. Fortran IV & Cobol on an IBM 1130 with a whopping 8K of core RAM. The school had a few TRS-80 Model Is, one of which had an expansion interface and a floppy drive. Oh, AND it was attached to an original Radio Shack line printer, which needed at least two minutes, IIRC, to print a full page, with no lower-case letters and no graphics. (I went through a phase of disassembling TRSDOS where I would start printing a source listing, then we would all head out to a nearby deli, and by the time we got back the printer might be finished.)
Those TRS-80s were for the Basic class, but you had to pass both Fortran AND Cobol before you could sign up for Basic. That didn't stop a handful of us from hanging around and using the micros after school. While the sporty types were out on the field, my friends & I were in the "computer lab" (aka the head math teacher's classroom) with the lights out, lit up by the CRTs, with a radio blasting. (We would have to pack out and make ourselves scarce from time to time, to make room for the school district's Continuing Education computer classes for adults.)
The school finally ditched the mainframe and used the money saved from just one year of leasing & supporting that beast to buy a dozen or so shiny new TRS-80 Model 4s with floppy drives, along with Fortran & Cobol compilers for them.
By then, we knew enough that the teachers recruited us to help set everything up and show them how to use the compilers.
Ironically (or maybe not), even though I was already a self-taught, self-proclaimed TRS-80 wiz by the time I took the class, my grades were poor because I spent too much of my lab time working on my own programs rather than classwork.
( @BDS107 : I envy your start. For years I was a hacker without a computer, until I saved up enough money to buy a used Model 4.)
( @Pete : Yeah, punch cards sucked, but having access to the card punches' chad bucket opened the door for all kinds of mischief with those tiny bits of very staticky card stock!)
Those TRS-80s were for the Basic class, but you had to pass both Fortran AND Cobol before you could sign up for Basic. That didn't stop a handful of us from hanging around and using the micros after school. While the sporty types were out on the field, my friends & I were in the "computer lab" (aka the head math teacher's classroom) with the lights out, lit up by the CRTs, with a radio blasting. (We would have to pack out and make ourselves scarce from time to time, to make room for the school district's Continuing Education computer classes for adults.)
The school finally ditched the mainframe and used the money saved from just one year of leasing & supporting that beast to buy a dozen or so shiny new TRS-80 Model 4s with floppy drives, along with Fortran & Cobol compilers for them.
By then, we knew enough that the teachers recruited us to help set everything up and show them how to use the compilers.
Ironically (or maybe not), even though I was already a self-taught, self-proclaimed TRS-80 wiz by the time I took the class, my grades were poor because I spent too much of my lab time working on my own programs rather than classwork.
( @BDS107 : I envy your start. For years I was a hacker without a computer, until I saved up enough money to buy a used Model 4.)
( @Pete : Yeah, punch cards sucked, but having access to the card punches' chad bucket opened the door for all kinds of mischief with those tiny bits of very staticky card stock!)