Allen to be a fully certified teacher in new york

Allen: To be a fully certified teacher in New York state required a master’s
degree. I had an undergraduate degree in mathematics, a minor in physics,
and had taught for two years. Then I went to the University of Michigan and
focused very much on mathematics. At the University of Michigan, in order
to get a master’s degree, one had to take two courses outside one’s field, so
I took a course on computing. Computer science didn’t exist then, in 1957.
It was ten years later that it started to emerge seriously. But they had a
couple of courses in the engineering school.
Seibel: What did they teach you?
Allen: They had an IBM 650 machine, which was quite a different machine
than what we’re used to today, and the students learned to program that
machine. That involved not only learning all about the machine itself and
coding in, essentially, assembly language but also running your programs on
the machine. It was a really hands-on experience.
Seibel: So you would punch your deck, take it to the machine yourself, and
feed it through yourself?
Allen: Right. And then go and fix it. It was a drum machine—the drum was
constantly spinning and that’s where your instructions were. So the way one
got it to run fast involved spacing the placement of the instructions on the
drum so as it turned the next instruction would be in the right place.

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Seibel: Then the IBM recruiters came around. What was it about working
at IBM that appealed to you?
Allen: Well, I just needed a job. I had this debt and the recruiter came on
campus and it was in the right geographical area, back in New York state. So
I filled out an application and really didn’t realize much about what group I
was interviewing with, the fact that it was IBM Research. I was kind of
clueless about that.
A few weeks later I got a call while I was interviewing for a faculty job at a
teacher’s college in southern Illinois. I was really getting desperate—it was
time to get a job and I didn’t have one. So I got that call while I was on the
road and took the job, sight unseen, and got the papers to report at what
turned out to be the research laboratory in Poughkeepsie.
So I went there and got started as a programmer. IBM was expanding
rapidly into computing and there weren’t any computer-science courses, so
they were hiring people from wherever they had found them.
Seibel: What kind of training did they give you?
Allen: Well, it was a kind of a learn-as-you-go, as I recall. There was an
orientation to the company but I don’t recall there was any programming
class per se, which is odd in retrospect. I suppose there were some classes,
depending on what your background was. It was all very informal.
The first assignment I got, because I’d been a math teacher, was to teach the
scientists and other programmers Fortran. I had joined in July of 1957 and
Fortran had been issued as a product on April 15 that same year. And IBM
Research—the group I was in—had an edict that by September all the
programming had to be done in Fortran. That was the way to convince their
own people, just as they were trying to get outside people to, to use it.