The connection between cars, and ways of interacting with computers, wouldn't have occurred to me at the time I was being taken for rides in that MGB. I had signed up to take a computer programming class at Ames High School. After a few introductory lectures, we students were granted admission into a tiny room containing a teletype, a telephone, and an old-fashioned modem consisting of a metal box with a pair of rubber cups on the top (note: many readers, making their way through that last sentence, probably felt an initial pang of dread that this essay was about to turn into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about how tough we had it back in the old days; rest assured that I am actually positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as it were, in preparation to make a point about truly hip and up-to-the minute topics like Open Source Software). The teletype was exactly the same sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper underneath.