Memory Lane: ‘I don’t use computers’

The title of this short piece comes from a statement I made almost 30 years ago while on sabbatical to the National Science Foundation (NSF). For you to understand this statement, I must take you back an additional 20 years to my days as a graduate student. Although I had used computers for a considerable part of my doctoral dissertation more than 50 years ago, computers and I did not have a very personal relationship. In fact, our mainframe computer would converse with me only through punch cards. To do what today would be called relatively simple calculations, I had to feed hundreds of punched cards into the computer, which devoured them like some savage beast and then spit them out intact with the same level of ferocity. The punched holes would translate my data and software into a language the computer understood. If there were errors, I had to search the printout and cards to find the errors and correct the cards that contributed to them. I eventually conquered the beast and was then ready to complete my dissertation based on my experiments and these computations. Exactly 50 years ago, I was in the middle of writing my doctoral thesis. Yes, writing out longhand a document that would eventually be close to 300 pages. I then paid a typist 1 per page for typing and subsequent corrections using a normal typewriter. This hands-off attitude toward computers carried on into my academic job as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. While