I started at Brooklyn Polytechnic and, even though I had a scholarship, I had to pay for books, supplies, etc., so I looked for a job at the school. I was able to get one at the bookstore, filling shelves, working at the cash register, etc. It was OK for a while, but it didn’t last long. At the beginning of each semester, it was hectic, with all the students getting what they needed for the semester.

    After a while, there was nothing to do, so the manager of the bookstore had to let me go. I told him I needed money and asked him if he knew anywhere else in the school where I could work. As luck would have it (extreme luck, as will be seen in the future), he knew the manager of the Computer Center and, as a result, we went there to see if he needed anybody.

    This was the late 60s, and the Computer Center was an enormous room with a big picture window. Behind it was a large hunk of metal, glass, blinking lights, etc. It was an ancient IBM 360/40 with 384K (that’s kilobytes!) of memory. I started with the menial task of combining printouts with punched cards for students writing programs for classes. Throughout the regular school year, it was pretty busy, as many students took programming classes.

    During the summer, however, it was less busy. I went to the Computer Operator, who was also taking computer classes, and asked him if I could learn about this machine. He gave me a book on Fortran, which is a scientific programming language. As I had free time, I started playing, and I got hooked. With my affinity for math, this was very intriguing. Here was a machine that could perform mathematical calculations extremely fast. I’m in! Which I was, as soon as I could take technical electives. I found this knowledge to be invaluable in my other classes and took programming courses as electives as much as I could. This would turn out to be an extremely fortunate fork.