In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to hammer out cryptic messages.

Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch processing technique. Before dialing the phone, we would turn on the tape puncher (a subsidiary machine bolted to the side of the teletype) and type in our programs. Each time we depressed a key, the teletype would bash out a letter on the paper in front of us, so we could read what we'd typed; but at the same time it would convert the letter into a set of eight binary digits, or bits, and punch a corresponding pattern of holes across the width of a paper tape. The tiny disks of paper knocked out of the tape would flutter down into the clear plastic hopper, which would slowly fill up what can only be described as actual bits. On the last day of the school year, the smartest kid in the class (not me) jumped out from behind his desk and flung several quarts of these bits over the head of our teacher, like confetti, as a sort of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image of this man sitting there, gripped in the opening stages of an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction, with millions of bits (megabytes) sifting down out of his hair and into his nostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning purple as he built up to an explosion, is the single most memorable scene from my formal education.

Anyway, it will have been obvious that my interaction with the computer was of an extremely formal nature, being sharply divided up into different phases, viz.: (1) sitting at home with paper and pencil, miles and miles from any computer, I would think very, very hard about what I wanted the computer to do, and translate my intentions into a computer language--a series of alphanumeric symbols on a page.