My Computers For Young People Story

When I was twelve years old my mother signed me up for a short course called "Computers For Young People" that was hosted at the local community college. The course was taught by a neighbour of mine named Eric who might have been four or six years older than I was at the time.

Somewhere in a banker's box upstairs I have the faded dot-matrix printout of the very first computer program that I ever wrote from that class. It went went something like this:

10 PRINT "You are walking through the woods when suddenly you see a monster!"
20 PRINT "He is big and hairy and his name is Eric!"
30 INPUT "He asks you 'What is 3 + 7 ? ' ", N
40 IF N=10 THEN PRINT "The monster growls disappointingly and walks away."
50 IF N<>=10 THE PRINT "The monster gobbles you up and then burps."
60 END

Today I learned from WIRED Magazine that Eric Veach is the software engineer and technical leader at Google who was behind the design and development of Google's AdWords and AdSense programs.

And in 1983 I made him laugh.