A special Visitor

On December 28, 2011, The Husman family came all the way from Northridge CA to visit the Computer History Museum at the request of their 10 year old son Glen.

This picture shows Glen, his younger brother and his father. His mother is busy taking pictures.

Glen was very interested in the IBM 1401 equipment. He showed me the programming he had done on his cell phone!

I had some work to do at the CHM and invited Glen to com back on Friday and I would teach him how to program the 1401. He and his mother accepted.

After a whiteboard session upstairs, Glen wrote a "Hello World" program on the IBM PC in the foyer.
He and his mother are shown above.

Glen then ran the program through the IBM 1401 simulator on the IBM PC.
The Glen ran "remote punch" to punch his object deck on one of the IBM 026 keypunches.
After he was shown how to load a program into the IBM 1402 card reader, he did so and the program ran as expected.

Glen was so excited with his success, he decided to write a program that read cards and put the data to the printer with a header for each line. There was an "(EOF)" card at the end he had to detect to stop the program.

This program also worked as designed.
Glen was fascinated that the IBM 1401 system has four "START" buttons so when he demoed his program, he used all of them.

I received the following E-Mail from Glen after he returned home.
I think I may have found a JAVA programmer to fix the problem with our ROPE programming environment!

Dear Stan,
    Thank you for teaching me how to program the IBM 1401 (Ancient) Computer. I enjoyed it very much. The Computer History Museum was, by far, the best museum I have ever been to. Thank you for inviting me back to program the IBM 1401. I will definitely like simulating, and programming for, the IBM 1401 at home. I will also like fixing that bug in the simulator, and, maybe adding a new feature, punching directly from the simulator program (so I can click "Punch" on the assembled code screen, and it will punch for me)! Speaking of which, I loved the remote punch feature! Thank you for inviting me.

Sincerely,
    Glen H.