What I Worked On

February 2021 Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming.

2021 年 2 月 在上大学之前，我在校外主要做的两件事是写作和编程。

I didn't write essays.

我没写论文。

I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories.

我写了当时新手作家应该写的东西，现在可能仍然是：短篇小说。

My stories were awful.

我的故事很糟糕。

They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

他们几乎没有任何情节，只有具有强烈感情的人物，我想这让他们很深刻。

The first programs I tried writing were on the IBM 1401 that our

我尝试编写的第一个程序是在 IBM 1401 上编写的

school district used for what was then called "data processing." This was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14.

学区用于当时所谓的“数据处理”。那是在九年级，所以我当时13岁或14岁。

The school district's 1401 happened to be in the basement of our junior high school, and my friend Rich Draves and I got permission to use it.

学区的1401恰好在我们初中的地下室，我和我的朋友Rich Draves获得了使用它的许可。

It was like a mini Bond villain's lair down there, with all these alien-looking machines — CPU, disk drives, printer, card reader — sitting up on a raised floor under bright fluorescent lights.

这就像一个迷你邦德恶棍的巢穴，所有这些看起来像外星人的机器——CPU、磁盘驱动器、打印机、读卡器——坐在明亮的荧光灯下的高架地板上。

The language we used was an early version of Fortran.

我们使用的语言是 Fortran 的早期版本。

You had to type programs on punch cards, then stack them in the card reader and press a button to load the program into memory and run it.

您必须在打孔卡上输入程序，然后将它们堆放在读卡器中，然后按按钮将程序加载到内存中并运行它。

The result would ordinarily be to print something on the spectacularly loud printer.

结果通常是在噪音非常大的打印机上打印一些东西。

I was puzzled by the 1401.

我对1401感到困惑。

I couldn't figure out what to do with it.

我不知道该怎么处理它。

And in retrospect there's not much I could have done with it.

回想起来，我能用它做的事情并不多。

The only form of input to programs was data stored on punched cards, and I didn't have any data stored on punched cards.

程序输入的唯一形式是存储在穿孔卡上的数据，而我没有在穿孔卡上存储任何数据。

The only other option was to do things that didn't rely on any input, like calculate approximations of pi, but I didn't know enough math to do anything interesting of that type.

唯一的其他选择是做一些不依赖于任何输入的事情，比如计算 pi 的近似值，但我不知道足够的数学知识来做任何有趣的类型。

So I'm not surprised I can't remember any programs I wrote, because they can't have done much.

所以我不记得我写过的任何程序，这并不奇怪，因为它们不可能做太多事情。

My clearest

我最清楚的

memory is of the moment I learned it was possible for programs not to terminate, when one of mine didn't.

记忆是我了解到程序有可能不终止的那一刻，而我的一个程序却没有终止。

On a machine without time-sharing, this was a social as well as a technical error, as the data center manager's expression made clear.

在没有分时的机器上，这既是一个社会错误，也是一个技术错误，正如数据中心经理的表达所表明的那样。

With microcomputers, everything changed.

有了微型计算机，一切都改变了。

Now you could have a computer sitting right in front of you, on a desk, that could respond to your keystrokes as it was running instead of just churning through

现在，您可以在您面前的桌子上放置一台计算机，它可以在运行时响应您的击键，而不仅仅是翻阅