Today is National Teacher Day, so I thought I'd attempt to remember Mrs. Hartman, who taught me programming and how to use computers.
True to fashion, I don’t remember much about Mrs. Hartman other than she was one of the few and perhaps only non-nun people at my Catholic grade school. She had a gravelly voice from chain smoking and I seem to recall her hair was rather 1950s-bouffanty. Such technology still being a relatively new thing at the time, the computer room, located just off the lobby of the school’s front entrance, was the size of a largish coat closet, which it may very well have been.
Mrs. Hartman taught me Applesoft BASIC on one of the later-model Apple II systems, circa 1984 or 1985. I remember enjoying learning about the Apple II’s amazing graphical capabilities and how I could create crazy patterns using FOR/NEXT loops and the RND() random number generator. In a more orderly fashion, I could plot a counted cross stitch-like pattern on graph paper then translate it into a BASIC program to make it appear onscreen.
We’re talking crazy oldskool graphics. The Apple II’s low-res graphics mode was 40 by 48 pixels with a whopping 16 color choices. You used the GR command to turn on the low-res goodness, COLOR to define the color, then PLOT (to lay down a single chubby pixel) or HLIN and VLIN (to draw a horizontal or vertical line of pixels) to build Lego-like images.
Learning BASIC from Mrs. Hartman was responsible for starting a string of computer milestones in my life: convincing my parents to buy me a Commodore 128, using money saved from my Toledo Blade paper route to buy my own Amiga 2000, taking a PASCAL course in college, buying a series of Macs in my adult life, and culminating in programming this web site.
Back to that fondly remembered Apple II, I also recall playing lots of Oregon Trail and frequently dying of dysentery.
Thanks, Mrs. Hartman, for getting me started on the right foot by using Apple computers. Who knows what evil I would now be perpetrating upon the world had I learned BASIC on a Windows machine.