Yes, that's me. Good to hear that I changed your life -- for the better :) I wrote the Pascal book during 1977-78, before I had my own computer. The Pascal programs in the book ran on a CDC 6400 at the university where I was working. Peter

Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1, Z80 processor, S100 motherboard, 64K RAM + 64K hard-to-access memory, 2 x 720K 8" disk drives in a separate cabinet. Computer + disks weighed > 80lbs together. Text-only monitor was connected by RS-232. I also had a 512 x 512 graphics monitor and a primitive dot-matrix printer. I programmed in assembler, Pascal, an muLISP.

The book I remember best was "Faster than Thought", edited by B V Bowden and published in 1953. I was about 12 when I read it and I did not understand very much!

I wrote a sorting program on a Flexowriter and fed the paper tape it into EDSAC 2 at Cambridge University c. 1963. All that I knew about computers was from popular reading about "electronic brains" and the lectures I received from Maurice Wilkes - great researcher but very boring teacher! So I guess I was pretty illiterate!

You have to be pretty ancient to appreciate the goto controversy. I was writing FORTRAN in the mid-sixties and my oh-so-clever programs were an unreadable tangle opf goto's and labels. My initial response to Dijkstra's letter was "program without goto - impossible!". But I soon saw the need for sensible control structures. Also, I see goto-restriction as a high-level language issue. I have never hesitated to use goto (or equivalent) instructions in assembly-language programming - often because there's nothing else. But knowing high-level control structures certainly improved my assembly style.