When I was a freshman in high school, we learned how to do computer programming in a language called "Basic." Back then, we had computer "punch cards" that were used to tell the computer each step we wanted it to do. Each command needed a separate card. So kids would walk around school carrying huge stacks of cards just to create a simple program.
These programs told the computer to draw things like ellipses, circles, hyperbolas, parabolas, or straight lines. This could take many steps in programming and would require a lot of cards.
The first personal computers were just coming out when I was entering college. One of the first and most popular was the Radio Shack TRS-80. I think it had 16 kB of RAM. That was HUGE... back then! Everything was stored on a floppy disk... not a hard drive. Some computers even stored data on audio cassettes!
Today, students have handheld programmable calculators that easily blow away the old TRS-80 computers we had. The Texas Instruments TI-84 above belongs to my daughter who is a freshman in high school. She used it to program the two images you see above.
Each drawing required about 61 equations to create. It's amazing how much more advanced students are today than we were way back when I was a freshman in high school! I think we would have had to be in Junior year before we would be learning anything like they are learning today. For us to do something similar to this on our huge computers at my old high school would have taken a lot of those computer cards too.
To give you an idea how far back we are talking about, when I was in high school, we were just retiring the "slide rule." A basic function calculator cost about $100. Today's "throw away" calculators cost about $2. The advanced programmable calculator above costs just over $100.
Technology keeps moving forward and kids keep learning at a faster pace!
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