Computer science was introduced in our school only in the 10th and 11th grades. I remember that at the end of the school year, computers were brought to us, but the classroom still needed to be organized. A remote history classroom was allocated for this purpose. Over the summer, brand-new Corvette computers were installed there. When 10th grade started, computer science lessons were held only once a week. I always looked forward to these classes, but unfortunately, there were too few of them. To learn more, I often asked my older friend, who had already studied computer science, for advice. Before these computers arrived, I studied on paper and with calculators. I still remember how he explained to me how to write a program to solve a quadratic equation in Basic.

Sometimes we managed to convince the teacher to let us stay after classes in the computer lab to work a bit longer—half an hour or an hour. After school, the building was quiet, the computers were brightly lit, and they still had that fresh, new smell. The teacher even treated me to his homemade pastry... But even these infrequent half-hours were not enough. Once, the teacher asked me to write a program to test his math class, which he was in charge of. I created a program that checked math tests and automatically assigned grades. It gave out a lot of failing grades, and I thought it was due to a mistake—turns out I had included some advanced problems marked with an asterisk. I didn’t have enough time to finish the program, and even during lessons, I often sat separately from the class, at the teacher’s computer, writing code. But time was always short.

One day, the teacher allowed us to stay after school on our own. He explained how to shut down the computer lab and lock the door. We worked on our programs: my classmate was writing logic tests, and I was helping. But, of course, we also found time for games. There was one game that only worked on the teacher’s computer, and we took turns playing it. Computer time flew by quickly, and we often stayed late.

Once, we stayed so late that the janitor barely let us out, asking why we were leaving so late. One of the boys who was with us said that we had been with the teacher and that she would be coming out soon too. Of course, that wasn’t true.

A few days later, the police came to my class and took me away. They interrogated me: where I had been, what I was doing, who I was with, and why we had left school so late. After the interrogation, they told me to go back to class. They also questioned the teacher. Of course, he got in trouble for leaving us unsupervised. After this incident, we were severely punished, and we were no longer allowed to stay after school.

That same night, some vandals broke the school windows, and the janitor said we were the last ones to leave... and that’s how it all started.

Before, we could spend time on the computers almost every day, even if only for a short while. But this incident deprived us of that opportunity for a long time. It seemed like the past was gone forever, and we would never be left alone there again. But time passed, maybe half a year, and somehow, perhaps because the teacher was in a good mood, he trusted us with the classroom after school once more.

Perhaps it was because of him that I fell in love with computers and programming. So many years have passed since school, and my friend and I wanted to visit him—only to find out that he had passed away a few years ago. He was a great computer science teacher. If he had also taught me physics, maybe I would have known it better.