Early Days

Glendale College

In 1964 I was a freshman at Glendale Junior College.   At that time I was a pre-med student.  As such, I had already studied as much math as was considered necessary for my major, so I was not taking any math classes.  But math was always one of my favorite subjects so I was fooling around on my own with graphing some equations from a book I had been reading.  

 

Here is a sample page from what I wrote about these equations:

 

 

And here are the graphs I drew:

 

 

I showed this work to my friend, David Shride.  I had known Dave since we were in fifth grade, but we became better friends when we ended up going to the same college.  When I showed him my work, he commented, “That would make a good computer program.”  This got my attention and from our conversation, I began to discover that he had been “playing” with computers at various local colleges with the help of another graduate of our high-school (whom I hadn’t known) named Prentiss Knowlton.