“Just about at this time, Denver, Colorado, had the worse flood of its history on the Platte River and it inundated all of the businesses on either side of it. Since the river cut Denver in half, you can imagine how bad it was.
“Well, IBM had an IBM 1130 in a business off the Platte River and it got filled six feet over its top with mud and water and they gave it to the Opportunity School — that’s Denver’s school for people getting jobs. Electronic instruction department. The man in that department finished eighth grade. And he was a genius. He could read the plans. He took that IBM 1130 apart, piece by piece, and washed it and put it back together again. He got the darn machine to work.
“So here we had a thrown-away IBM 1130 with nobody using it, because he didn’t know how to program it. He just knew how to fix it and I had, oh, by that time, three or four classes that used punch cards. Control Data [had taken] their computer back and we ran a Pony Express trip to Opportunity School with our punch cards. That’s how we all got started in this program.”