I thought I was getting a good head start on my future in this technologically-obsessed culture. I took computer science in high school. Our school was well funded, and we had some of the latest technological equipment. We had a main frame computer, and our typing classrooms were equipped with electric typewriters. (The other high school in town was still using manual typewriters.)

In my grade eleven computer science class, we were taught to write programs in Fortran, which back then was on the cutting edge of computer languages. We wrote our programs one line at a time on paper cards with soft pencils, and then fed the stack of cards into the mainframe. We had user cards which, as I recall, allowed us eight seconds of computer time. (This put a limit on our favorite infantile trick: run a program with an endless loop of “skip a page”, which would result in the computer spewing out blank sheets of paper until our time ran out.)

Then in grade twelve, we advanced to a computer language called Cobalt, which as I recall, contained more words that Fortran. We were allowed to use the keypunch machine, which was just a keyboard which punched holes in the paper cards, so we didn’t have to use a pencil to mark the bubbles. Now we were really moving up the ladder of technical prowess! I somehow managed one day to get the machine to spew out reams of unpunched cards, just like in the movie “Nine to Five”. I had to unplug the machine to end the projectile vomiting of paper cards.

One day, our teacher brought in something called a “personal computer” or just PC, as a show and tell object. We had never seen anything like it. He had written a fun program in which we entered data for a motorcycle stunt: the angle of the ramp, speed of the motorcycle, objects to try to jump over; and the computer would calculate whether or not your stuntman survived, and if he did, what bodily injury he suffered. No graphics. Cutting edge technology!

While in university taking my bachelor of education, I got a job in the library. We had an astonishingly new program for signing out books. We just waved a magic wand over something called a barcode, and about one in three times it actually worked! (The other two times, we had to manually enter all of the numbers on the barcode – I think there must have been about 16 digits.) I was really advanced now! Except when it came to logging in or out of the system. I usually had to get help to get all of those steps in order.