“Once a week, they had an appointment with me at one of my obnoxious meeting times, 5 am, 6 am, 7 am. Sometimes, after school. I had classes at the house. It was wonderful. I had one kid with the Atari program. Atari couldn’t sell its program through to the Department of Defense, which is a huge sale, because nobody could make it work with Pascal. Pascal is one of the languages — a difficult, a popular language during the halcyon years I’ve been describing.
“This was a black kid who loved computers and was very bright. He was looking for a project, like they all did. You can’t get into my fifth semester computer class without a project. So he is sitting there and talking with me and I say, ‘Well, I have a ready-made project. Try to make the Atari run Pascal. If you can make it run Pascal, I can use Pascal to program complicated things to math on the Atari, instead of just using the IBM computer and the Apple.’ Up to this time, the Ataris were just fun things, toys, really played games on them.
“So he says, ‘All right.’ I told him he could use my telephone (I already explained how I got my telephone — I kept it and never told them where that telephone was). I gave him free use of the telephone. And there was a guy at Swarthmore, who was the intellectual genius behind the Atari, and he called him up and they talked several times. In any event, we got it to run Pascal.
“There was a computer convention here and the Vice President of Atari was here and he came to see this $1.5 million grant they gave us. And I said, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t implement Pascal. We’re doing fine with it.’ He said, ‘What!’ So he had to come over to the school and we had to leave the convention and he saw us run Pascal on very complex mathematics and he looked at me and said, ‘Nobody’s done this before. Will you fly to California and explain to my engineers what you did?’ I said, ‘I don’t do any explaining. I will take the kid who designed this and let him explain.’
“So he says, ‘Good.’ So they sent me two tickets to go to Silicon Valley and we get there and, on the way, we are in an airplane and I am telling this kid—and we’re in the last two seats — right near where the person stands who brings you coffee and stuff. She was an African-American lady. About 15 minutes after we are talking together, she hits me on the shoulder and says, ‘Is this kid for real?’ I said, ‘Why? I’m used to kids talking like that.’ She said, ‘I never saw a kid act so smart and you are learning from him.’ I said, ‘I’m his teacher. I want to know what he’s learned.’ She said, ‘Man, he is heavy duty.’ And she took out a piece of paper and wrote down her daughter’s name and phone number, who went to the Harvard of African-Americans, in Washington, DC — Howard University.
“We get to Silicon Valley and they met us and treated us to dinner. The kid has his first lobster of his whole life and he has unlimited movies to watch all night Anyway, bleary-eyed, he came in the next day, took out the lecture thing, and answered every question they had about how he did it and how he moved memory away from the limited memory and moved memory back and shifted things around. These were the engineers who designed the machine, and he’s teaching them how he programmed it to do what he had to do, because he had to do something for me. That’s what he said.
“So they wanted him as a consultant. I said, ‘Well, my students hire out at specific salaries. Now if you want a consultant, it’s $100 a day.’ They didn’t think that was bad at all. Then they drove us back to the airport and we went home and this ‘Charles Tucker Heavy Duty’ — what we called him from then on — said he gets $100 a day, when he worked for Atari. Wow! Those kids were aghast. $100 a day. So was I. We were earning $50 a day as a teacher.
“They called him up about a week later and wanted him to come out and consult. They said, ‘You buy a ticket and we will reimburse you.’ He comes to see me and he says, ‘Doc, how can I buy a ticket?’ I said, ‘You use a credit card.’ He said, ‘Doc, we don’t have no credit cards in my house.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll use my credit card and you’ll reimburse me.’ Then he said, ‘They told me to rent a car. I can’t rent a car until I’m 25; that’s ten years from now.’ So I called them and said, ‘You not only got to pick him up. He can’t rent a car, but he’s got to take College Boards this Saturday morning, and you gotta take him there.’ It was the first time in their lives that they had a consultant they had to drive to take College Boards. They had to drive him around, because he couldn’t rent a car. ‘I don’t think he can rent a hotel room either. You’re going to have to take care of it.’
“He graduated the University of Colorado with a degree in computer science. He knew so much about computers that he got $50 an hour. This was in those days, which is maybe $150 to $200 an hour now or more. And he left college with his degree in computer science, owning a condominium, owning a new car. He just lived the life of Riley, while he was there. He’s probably retired now, too. “