: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth →
During the summer of 1957, between my freshman and sophomore years at Case Tech in Cleveland, I was allowed to spend all night with an IBM 650, and I was totally hooked.
But there was no question of viewing that as a “life’s work,” because I knew of nobody with such a career. Indeed, as mentioned above, my life’s work was to be a teacher. I did write a compiler manual in 1958, which by chance was actually used as the textbook for one of my classes in 1959(!).
The man. The myth. The legend.