In the mid-seventies at Swarthmore College, we were mired in punched card Fortran programming on a single IBM 1130. The horror, a machine less powerful than the first Apple II. My job six hours a week was to reboot after each crash. People waited hours for their turn to crash the machine. I let a line form once people had their printouts. I'd find the single pair of brackets in a ten line listing, and I'd explain how their index was out of bounds. They thought I was a genius. Late one Saturday night, I made a misguided visit to the computer center while high, smelled sweat and fear, and spun to leave. Too late, a woman's voice: "Dave! I told Professor Pryor he needed you!" We didn't know that Fred Pryor was the economics graduate student freed in the 1962 "Bridge of Spies" prisoner exchange. Later he’d learn that I was his beagle’s favorite human, and I’d dog-sit to find steaks for me I couldn’t afford, but for now I feared him. So busted! Then I heard this voice “See these square brackets? See where you initialize this index?” He was spectacularly grateful.

One cannot overstate the rend in the universe that an APL terminal presented, catapulting me decades into the future. I quickly dreamed in APL. For $3 an hour for ten hours (a massive overcharge) I took a professor’s 300 line APL program translated literally from BASIC, and wrote a ten line APL program that was much faster. One line was classic APL, swapping + and * in an iterated matrix product for max and min. The other nine lines were input, output. The professor took years to realize I wasn’t also calling his code, then published my program.

Summer of 1977 I worked as a commercial APL programmer. Normally one never hires college students for the summer and expects them to be productive. The New York-based vice president was taking the train every day to Philadelphia because the Philly office was so far underwater, and desperate to try anything to save himself the commute. He knew Swarthmore had a terminal, and heard about me. At my interview I made a home-run derby of the questions from the Philly boss. The VP kept trying to intervene so he could put me in my place before hiring me. The tough questions were “dead key problems”. How do you write the following program, if the following keys are broken?

Our client was a mineral mining company, our task a reporting system. The reports were 2-dimensional projections of a 9-dimensional database. The accountants wanted all totals to be consistent across reports, and to be exactly the sums of their rounded components. I broke the news to our team that we needed to start over, rounding the 9-dimensional database once and for all, before generating each report. This took a few weeks; I wrote plenty of report generation helper routines. My coworkers overheard me say on a phone call that I was being paid $5 an hour, and at the time I didn’t understand which way they were shocked. I didn’t have much to do, the rest of the summer.

The mining company VP found me one morning, to ask for a different report, a few pages. He sketched it for me. He found me a few hours later to update his spec. He loved the printout he saw, imagining it was a prototype. “It’s done. I can make your changes in half an hour.”

At a later meeting he explained his own background in computing, how it had been key to his corporate rise. Their Fortran shop would take a month to even begin a project like I had knocked off in a morning, then weeks to finish it. He pleaded with me to pass on Harvard grad school and become his protege.

Some Lisp programmers had similar experiences, back in the day. Today, APL just sounds like another exotic language. In its heyday it was radical.