“At just about this time, I got a call from the Vice President of Atari, who was one of my former students, and he says, ‘I’ve convinced Atari to give you enough computers to teach more people.’ So I said yes. I didn’t think I had to check with anybody. So he gave us fifty computers. They had to tear a wall out of George Washington High School and they had to put electrical connections in. It was funny. The Principal told me ‘Never, ever ask for more equipment!’ The Atari grant I got — I only had to write a page — I said I would try to find ways to make your computer useful in a high school math curriculum and I did. They even did some of the advanced stuff that the IBM computers eventually did in the 80s.

“But this was still in the 70s. I was heady with excitement, because the kids were well-known and The [Denver] Post and TV stations were all calling me to have articles about what the kids were doing with the carpool. By the time we got to Washington, DC, it was the fanciest printout you’ve ever seen. They put 10 digitized addresses in concentric circles; when it got to ten, it built another set of ten. Digitized addresses in concentric circles. And you were sent out — your individual addresses and phones numbers of people who were in your circle of ten neighbors. And, if we couldn’t get ten neighbors within a half-a-mile radius, when we used the distance formula, we measured, and had people pick the students up en route, rather than have them all get together and get picked up.

“In any event, it worked so well Denver Regional Council of Governments built us a carpool map, named George Washington High School Car Pool Map. People would come to us to be taught how to digitize their employees and, of course, the high schools knew how to digitize, because it was part of normal mathematics. Atari gave us $150,000 worth of computers. The first grant I got was from the Denver Public Schools for $10,000 to buy programmable calculators.

“And we talked about that with the Monroe Calculator Company and they sent us three or four Monroe calculators that had preceded the desk top computer. It had 2,000 memory locations. It was like a machine language and we had fun with that. Then their research lab designed a graphing machine that worked with it. And of course, nobody locally in the company in Monroe could understand any of the directions on how to do that, so they gave it to us to figure out, and then they designed a typewriter you could program and format.”

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