It was 1980. I had been teaching mathematics at the Ohio State University for a few years when an interesting opportunity came my way, and then I became an editor in the math department of the Merrill Publishing Company.
Back then, there was growing market demand for educational software, and for materials to teach computer programming, and it was up to the math department to satisfy that demand.
The other, more senior editors had little interest in the microcomputers that were becoming so popular in schools. They disputed the value of teaching computer programming to high school students. What good would it be to know how to program a computer unless you were going to be a programmer?
The demand fell on me. I procured an Apple II computer that had been sitting in a hallway and I taught myself BASIC. I developed lessons and exercises in BASIC programming for Merrill’s math texts. And I wrote strands on computer literacy. I wrote about Babbage’s Difference Engine, Ada Lovelace, Pascal’s calculator, ENIAC, Grace Hopper, and twos complement math.
It occurred to me (quite rightly) that the computer could be used to do editorial work. Before long, I had it developing exercises for Merrill’s algebra textbooks! I had the satisfaction of telling a computer to do my work for me: sitting there with my feet on the desk, my hands behind my head, watching it do just that.
Here’s what I did that caught everyone’s attention. An algebra or calculus textbook might contain thousands of function graphs. At the time, producing these graphs was a very tedious and time-consuming affair. After an editor selected a function, he or she would sketch it on graph paper. Then, an artist would develop a more detailed sketch and send it to the editor for approval. After the editor approved the sketch, the artist would prepare a mechanical. This took some time.
I developed a program that allowed an editor to simply enter a function and a range, and a dot-matrix printer would produce a very detailed sketch. The artist could prepare the mechanical directly from that sketch. Of course, this saved a lot of time. But more than that, it proved to everyone — editor and artist alike — that microcomputers could be useful: very useful, indeed.
