Punch cards, midnight experiments, and the strange things you discover when you take machines apart to see how they work.
It was a late night as I placed another deck of punch cards into the IBM-1620 in the university computer center. It was boring work—load a deck, start the run, wait for the machine to finish—but it helped pay my tuition.
The punch-card feeder had its own rhythm, like a sewing machine that had learned how to hurry.
Clack-clack-clack. A pause. Then another burst as the deck moved through the machine.
That sound carried across the computer center in a way it never did during the day. I was the only operator on the shift. The routine was simple: load a deck, start a run, wait, repeat. Between those small rituals the room settled into long stretches of quiet. The machines hummed softly. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
That quiet is how I learned to program.
These days, people talk about artificial intelligence as if it appeared out of nowhere—machines writing essays, answering questions, composing music, carrying on conversations that sound uncannily human.
Underneath all that sophistication lies something simple: computers are very good at noticing patterns and rearranging them. They were already doing that sixty years ago.
For me back then, a computer was just a new toy—something to take apart and see how it works.
When I was 15, a Honeywell engineer—one of the volunteer dads at our high school—began giving after-school talks about computers. In the mid-1960s most people had never seen one, and the idea that a machine could perform useful work seemed almost magical. The afternoon program didn’t attract anybody from the football team–but it sucked me right in.
He explained it plainly. A computer simply followed instructions. If you understood it well enough, you could make it do remarkable things.
That idea stuck.
Two years later, I was working three jobs to pay tuition and living expenses. One was DJing in a strip club on lower Washington Street, Boston’s “Combat Zone.” Another was a late-night shift on Boston radio WMEX. The third job—the quiet one—was the computer center.
While the machines ran, I read manuals and experimented. Slowly they stopped looking like equipment and started looking like puzzles.
Before long, that curiosity led to a part-time programming job at a computer services company in Watertown called Dial-Data.