“I need to tell you an anecdote to tell you how successful it was. The machines that punched cards — we had two of those machines at George Washington High School and they used those machines to sort for classes. Denver Public School bought a Burroughs and somebody had programmed for them — they didn’t, of course — a way of keeping track of who was in school and who wasn’t. But the cards themselves had no typing on the top. There were just hole.
And I had a 15-year-old kid get a part-time summer job at the hospital that trains doctors in Denver, as part of the University of Colorado. Two guys who were in there were very famous doctors doing research, trying to write a program — they had taught themselves how to program — and they were trying to run a program for their research.
Now just picture this: a scruffy little 15-year-old boy, pushing a broom to get the dust off the floor, two eminent physicians by the University of Colorado’s computer programming using Fortran and nothing worked. And they were having this discussion and finally the young boy with the broom says, ‘Gentlemen, may I have one word?’ and they gave him this glare. He said, ‘Your problem is in your programming. You’re using the letters I, J, K, L, M, and N for the name of the variables and, as such, you are getting integers out of everything where you need decimals. You’re truncating off the decimals. I tell you, if you change those or declare those as real numbers, I think your program will work.’ They had gone through everything out loud and he heard as he was pushing the broom. Well, it worked.
“I got a call from one of the doctors who said, ‘We have a genius from your school.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and they explained it. I said, ‘No, we’ve got about 70 or 80 kids who could have told you that, we have in our classes.’ They couldn’t believe that their university wasn’t teaching programming and this high school, eight blocks away, was.
“He had a job. They gave him a job reading the punch cards. He could read the holes and write what it meant. So could all of the other kids. So all of the kids in my computer lab were assured that they would have a job at the University of Colorado Medical School, if they would read the cards and help the doctors with their programming.”
“So it became obvious to me that I had a job factory and I set a fair wage of $5 an hour, which was a lot of money in — whatever it was — in the middle to late 60s. No kid could take a job and get $5 an hour with anybody, unless they checked with me. And the people who were hiring learned that they couldn’t come and hire from anybody but me. And I was able to get kids jobs — good jobs — and, of course, getting a good job is a big deal to a high school kid. So that really made the program popular, among other things.”