“One thing, the curriculum that I was teaching had no textbooks, no outline, no nothing. I was desperately trying to figure out how the high school math curriculum could be enhanced by using computers and I picked that as the topic for my Ph.D. thesis. The program at the University of Denver at this time — where I was working on my Doctor’s degree — loved what I was doing and they had a Burroughs computer that used DIBOL [Digital’s Business Oriented Language]. They also allowed Fortran, but DIBOL was their first choice. They decided to give my students the use of my DU student card. That way, they could come in and use the University of Denver program, as if they were me. And they also gave my students my library ID card, so they could go to the University of Denver’s Library and develop my curriculum.

“And these advanced students — now about four semesters of students— called Advanced Computer Mathematics — and their job was to find something in mathematics that lent itself to enhancement by using a computer. They could check out all the books, etc., and their course was to find something — and if I didn’t know what it was, they had to sit and teach me. Then they had to get my okay that’s that all right, and then they had to write a textbook using that. So my advanced students wrote textbooks, that came with little holes in the sides of the paper and you flipped them over. Depending where the kid was in the real math curriculum, depended what textbook I told him to check out. The student was graded on the quality of his book, his mathematics, and the way he explained it to me — the teacher, the slow one of the group.

“Well, the high school kid who has his name on the textbook in the library, that was checked out just like a real textbook. They were so excited. The problem I had was that they needed to do technical writing and there were no courses in the Denver Public Schools on technical writing. They had Advanced Placement creative writing, so I got to the Advanced Placement creative writing teacher and had her take one of the two days a year we were allowed to research our subject and go with me to the IBM plant in Boulder, where she saw the people doing technical writing. She couldn’t believe the difference between the technical writing and the creative writing she was doing.

“I convinced the schools — that’s why I call them the best school system — I convinced the schools to try an experimental class in technical writing and we did it. They spent one week with her and one week with a friend of mine, Gil Johnson, in the computer lab. He taught them how to use a new item from IBM, a spreadsheet, where you could do spreadsheet stuff and you could do graphics stuff and circle graphs and line graphs, For you guys now, that might not seem like such a big deal, but during those days, we had to write in our own programs to do a lot of that stuff. In any event, at the end of the year, we entered a contest for technical writing in the United States and we won first and third place in the country with our technical writing. “

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