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Creative Computing for All

A Little History

Creative Computing was a magazine started by David Ahl in 1974. David started the magazine at the dawn of the personal computer age. The magazine regularly included BASIC source code for educational programs and games, which users could manually enter into their home computers.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, saw an opportunity to develop a BASIC Interpreter for the Altair 8800- the first home kit microcomputer announced in 1975. They went on to found Microsoft in 1976.

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak wrote the BASIC Interpreter for the Apple II. The Apple II was unique among microcomputers because of the color graphics commands, which made it easy to create interactive games.

In 1977, the First West Coast Computer Faire was held in San Francisco. What followed was a series of new personal computers. The Commodore PET, the Atari 400, the TRS-80 from Radio Shack, to name a few, and in 1981 the first IBM PC. All of these personal computers included a BASIC language.

In this environment, young people were first exposed to the thrill of creative computing. Writing their own programs in BASIC was a creative outlet that flourished. They learned this skill by reading magazines and entering the code. They improved their skills by reading the code of others.

In 1977, I attended the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. When I returned, a group of us at UW-Parkside organized the First Midwest Computer Faire. Our main attraction was an address by Ted Nelson, who discovered and coined the concept of "hypertext." Another feature of the faire was a BASIC language programming challenge for El (grades 4-6), Jr (grades 7-9), and Sr (grades 10-12). This was followed by five more Midwest Computer Faires, and BASIC programming challenges.

In 1981, the local programming challenge was expanded and became the International Computer Problem Solving Contest (ICPSC) which was announced in Creative Computing. This ran successfully from 1981 to 1995 and at its zenith involved 10,000 participants in the US and 18 foreign countries. It was a team event (up to three on each team) and had three divisions with four different languages: BASIC, Pascal, C, and Logo.

In 1992, I picked the first USA team and took them to Bonn, Germany for the 4th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) . When I returned home, Rob Kolstad and I created the USA Computing Olympiad to train and select the future USA teams that represent the United Stated at the annual IOI.