trevordayschool

But now, nearly 50 years later,it is pretty much the only thing I remember about my junior year of high school.Those few months with that system had a profound effect on how I thought about education in the years to come. Mid 1970s: The Beginnings Somewhere in the mid 1970s, I got another chance to work with computers. e head of e Spence School had gotten so excited about the promise of the then-new minicomputer that he bought a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Programmed Data Processor (PDP) system for his school. At e Day School, Head of School Tom Mansfield heard about this and set up a visit for a small group of teachers to see and hear about this new marvel. As I recall, there was a general sense that maybe the Spence head had gone a little overboard with this project, but that PDP was only a block or so away, and shortly thereafter, a time-sharing connection was installed in our Upper School science room, allowing us to access the DEC machine over a dedicated phone line, much as I had accessed that mainframe in 1966. Since I was the (only) science teacher and had had (limited) experience with something akin to this strange beast, it became my baby. e PDP also had a teleprinter, but a significantly updated one from 1966. is one printed at something like 30 characters per second, and there was no paper-tape hassle; you simply typed your line, and when you hit "enter," your work went directly to the computer one block north. Perhaps drawing on my previous experience, when this machine came in, I made it available to any student who wanted to see what it could do. ere were no formal classes, no grading, just, "Here it is; none of us is an expert here; see what you can do with it." Of course, this approach was very much in line with the educational philosophy of the Upper School, and many students used some of their unscheduled time (no study halls then) to experiment. A number of teachers also tried it out. is terminal rapidly became so popular that we installed a second, and then (if I remember correctly) a third. It was rare that any of them stayed unused for long, and it was not unusual for a student to spend a long afternoon after school working on a program. e available language was BASIC, now thought to be about the worst coding system ever devised, but students and faculty alike were undeterred, teaching themselves how to create simple games, solve math problems, or, not infrequently, make the system do something that nobody had thought of before. In this fashion, "computer science" was born at Trevor—not as a course, but as something students (and teachers!) did because they wanted to. ey could fail to achieve their goals, but they couldn't fail the subject, and the system was happy to let them try as many different things as they had time for to solve the problems that arose. 1978 to the Mid 1990s: Advent of the Microcomputer While the time-share system was powerful enough to fully intrigue many students, the interface was slow, clunky, and not all that reliable. In 1975 Popular Electronics ran an article about how—for under $500— you could build your own "personal" microcomputer using newly available semiconductor chips from Intel. Even though these systems were not easy to build and really

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