I was one of thousands of people, back in the 1980s, who thought that computing was some sort of black art. It just seemed so clever that one could enter letters or numbers, which were then manipulated by some sort of unseen thought process. I found the whole idea fascinating and I wished that I had attended the sort of school progressive enough to teach computer programming, although I thought that it would take a much superior brain than mine, to make a computer do those amazing things. At that time, I had a friend who was something of a whiz with computers, to the extent that he could decipher huge dumps of paper covered with nothing but ones and zeros, and he persuaded me that it wasn't too late to learn and that the whole process was really very logical and simple. As a result of my friend's faith in my abilities, I signed up for an evening class in BASIC programming. BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which is a high level progra...