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After graduation and a range of jobs for a few years, including some govern-
ment security work, I became an editor for a medical journal published by the U.S.
Public Health Service in Washington, D.C. At about the same time, the Public
Health Service acquired some IBM 1401 computers and began to advertise for
programmers.
In those days, actual trained programmers were scarce, so the method used was
to find people, such as myself, who were familiar with Public Health Service op-
erations and then send them to programming schools.
The selection process included an interesting and, I thought, well-designed
aptitude test to see whether candidates were qualified. There were combinations
of logical questions and some with a smattering of math. This test was called the
programming aptitude test
(PAT), and it was developed by IBM. It took about an
hour to complete.
After passing the aptitude test and being hired as a programmer, I was sent to
the local IBM school in Washington, D.C., to learn to program the IBM 1401 us-
ing a language called Autocoder.
In the 1960s, programming was not usually taught at universities and never in
high school. It was necessary to go to private schools run by companies that built
computers such as IBM, RCA, GE, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the like.
The instructors were actual programmers and their knowledge was practical and
down to earth. There was little theory and a lot of practical information.
Since there were few computer science programs at the university level, the
majority of programmers in those days had other majors. In my first programming
group, one of the best programmers had been a history major. There were several
math majors and also music majors and English majors. A facility with music
and a facility with the flow of words are congruent with programming because all
three skills involve visualizing and expressing logical sequences. One person in
the group only had a high school education but turned out to be a good program-
mer. Our group had no engineering majors because we were tasked with building
business applications rather than scientific or engineering software.
Once a young programmer learned an initial programming language, it was
fairly easy to learn new languages through self-instruction. I recall later program-
ming in COBOL, PL/I, and various dialects of BASIC just by picking up the lan-
guage manuals and learning the syntax and keywords. The ability to visualize pat-
terns is the key to successful programming. The syntax of various programming
languages is a minor issue that ranges from annoying to moderately helpful.
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