My senior year in high school we took some a trip to Lehigh University, at least those of us in the academic track made the trip. Presumably it was some sort of career day thing, and we were given a choice of several different topics to choose from.

I recall that I chose the one entitled “Information Retrieval”.

We weren’t the only high school there that day because I remember sitting next to someone from a different school, I don’t recall which one, and before the seminar (or whatever it was) began, he confided in me that he chose this topic because it was the only one that he couldn’t figure out what it was about.

But I knew what it was about. It was about computers.

I can’t say that I was fascinated by computers, but I was certainly interested in them, though I hardly knew anything about them, and that’s probably why they piqued my curiosity. I was familiar with computer punch cards, because that’s what I was sent every month by the various book and record clubs that I had belonged to, and each card was accompanied by the stern warning not to bend, fold, or mutilate. I had only the haziest idea of how the cards worked or what their relationship was to computers.

In any case I found the seminar (if that’s what it was) very interesting. It was, in fact, about computers, and the vast amounts of information that the modern world was producing and how computers were becoming more and more necessary to help make sense out of all that data.

The only thing I specifically recall from that seminar (I mean, what else might it have been) though is the story about the early attempts to have computers translate from one human language to another.

In trying to translate from English to Russian, the computer had been given the phrase “Out of sight, out of mind.” Then it translated the Russian back into English and the result was “Blind maniac.” 

Of course, I learned years later that that was an apocryphal story and almost certainly never happened. It got a good laugh, however.

And had computers not been on my radar before, they most certainly were on my radar now. So I was definitely primed to try to take a computer course or two once I got to college.

But that cheeky short story that I wrote a few weeks ago was correct; after I saw that my roommate was staying up until the wee hours of the morning trying to get his programs to run, because he couldn’t get time on the shared computers during the day, my interest in taking any computer courses waned considerably. 

And I never did.