STORY
Testing If the Computer Could Do Math and My First Bug-Free Program
Testing If the Computer Could Do Math and My First Bug-Free Program
- Before I ever touched a physical terminal, I had devoured the HP 2000 BASIC time-shared manual from cover to cover—reading it front to back multiple times until the syntax lived in my head.
- Wanting to see for myself whether a computer could actually do arithmetic, I hand-wrote a complete interactive four-function calculator program on paper:
- "Press 1 for Add, 2 for Subtract, 3 for Multiply, 4 for Divide."
- On a crisp Saturday morning, my parents brought 10-year-old me to the local high school to meet the computer teacher who had agreed to give me weekend access to their terminal.
- The teacher sat down beside me, cracked open the introductory BASIC book to page one, and prepared to give me a gentle beginner's lesson:
- "Let's start here..."
- I looked at the book, looked at the teacher, and said:
- "No, can I just type this program in and see if it runs?"
- I pulled out my handwritten code, sat down in front of the deafening ASR-33 Teletype terminal, and carefully entered every line into the HP 2000 Time-Shared BASIC system.
- I hit run—and it executed flawlessly on the very first try.
- It correctly prompted for input, took numbers, computed the operations, and printed the answers without a single syntax error or runtime glitch.
- The very first computer program I ever wrote and ran in my life was 100% bug-free.
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.