Courses in agriculture for the secondary schools of Texas

Allen: To be a fully certified teacher in New York state required a masterБЂ™s degree. I had an undergraduate degree in mathematics, a minor in physics, and had taught for two years. Then I went to the University of Michigan and focused very much on mathematics. At the University of Michigan, in order to get a masterБЂ™s degree, one had to take two courses outside oneБЂ™s field, so I took a course on computing. Computer science didnБЂ™t exist then, in 1957. It was ten years later that it started to emerge seriously. But they had a couple of courses in the engineering school. Seibel: What did they teach you? Allen: They had an IBM 650 machine, which was quite a different machine than what weБЂ™re used to today, and the students learned to program that machine. That involved not only learning all about the machine itself and coding in, essentially, assembly language but also running your programs on the machine. It was a really hands-on experience. Seibel: So you would punch your deck, take it to the machine yourself, and feed it through yourself? Allen: Right ...»