So yesterday, when I was writing the post about computing at my high school and middle school, I was tempted to go even further back and mention my first experience of scholastic computing, which came at the hands of one of those visionary teachers one encounters a time or two in a student career.

In 1979, when I was in the first grade, one of the upper-grade teachers at the elementary school I was attending at the time believed so strongly in the potential of the microcomputer as an educational tool - at a time when the people in charge of the Millinocket school system clearly did not - that he bought two of the original Radio Shack TRS-80 computers (later retroactively called the "Model I") for his classroom. And when I say "bought", I mean he paid for them himself. This was not a trivial outlay for a man on a rural teacher's salary, I assure you; Wikipedia claims that the TRS-80 started at $600 apiece when new, which is somewhere north of $2200 in today's money.

Mr. Burton taught fourth or fifth grade, so under normal circumstances I would have known nothing about this at the time; we moved across town that winter, so the following school year I was transferred to a different school. (Hard to believe that this town once had three geographically distinct K-5 schools. Two are gone now - literally, in the case of old Katahdin Avenue School, where I went from second grade to fifth; the town tore it down a few years ago rather than keep maintaining the building. But I digress.) The thing was that my mother worked for the school at the time, as the "gifted & talented" teacher, and as she was big into educational innovation as well, she and Mr. Burton were on the same page as regards the potential of microcomputing (and the frustrating blindness of the administration to same). She used to work with him on various projects his students and hers could do with the machines after school, and lacking any better ideas, I would go down there and hang around.

So Mr. Burton's TRS-80s were probably the first microcomputers I used, and although I remember little enough of first grade clearly, that holy-shit-look-at-that sensation from running that first absurdly simple BASIC program everyone attempted in those days,

10 PRINT "HELLO";
20 GOTO 10

remains with me still.

Like I say, I thought about going that far back in the Elder Days Story Time post, but I decided that it was straying rather far afield from the original point, inasmuch as I even have one, so I filed it away for some later date. Just now, I was thinking about it again, and decided to see if Google could tell me what ever became of Mr. Elliot Burton, who moved away many years ago to seek greener pastures in better-funded, less-stupidly-administered school districts.

And it did. It told me, in fact, that he died.

Yesterday.

As coincidences go, that is more than a little bit creepy.

Rest in peace, Mr. Burton. You were the only sonofabitch in that headquarters knew what he was tryin' to do.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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