Origins: Hall C

In middle school, my father signed me up for a typing class as one of my electives. I threw quite the hissy fit about it. Why would I want to spend an entire class typing? It sounded unbelievably boring.

The classroom was filled with Apple IIe computers sporting green monochrome monitors and dual 5.25" floppy drives. To this day, I can still remember the beep each computer made as it powered on, the feel and sound of those keyboards beneath my fingertips, and the endless rhythm of typing home row exercises.

There's a reason people say, "fathers know best." As much as I hated that class at the time, I still type around 90 WPM today.

It wasn't the only time he saw something I couldn't.

Long before I understood what he was doing, he moved our family from Illinois to Texas. He told me he knew that neither of his sons was cut from the same farm-cloth as he was, or the generations before him. I hate the outdoors. Farming was never going to be my future.

Instead, I started first grade in Allen, Texas, our new home.

Finding Hall C

Allen High School sat at the corner of Main St. and Jupiter Rd. As the number of students grew, so did the campus. The original section was on the south side, containing the main office, library, and Halls A, B, and C. As the school expanded northward, it added Halls D, E, and K, the cafeteria, the gymnasium, and finally the band hall and auditorium at the far north end of campus.

Over the years, my mom would take me to school with her while she got some work done. Her room was unique. Part classroom and part office, it had a door leading into her private office in one corner. Next door was the Life Skills classroom, connected by an adjoining door. I still remember the covered parking spot next to the sidewalk and walking up the small ramp to the side entrance. I can still picture the layout of both rooms.

I especially enjoyed getting to play on the Apple IIGS in her classroom. Compared to the Apple IIe computers I had used before, this one had a color monitor, a mouse, and actual sound through an external speaker. It felt incredibly advanced to me at the time. I now realize what a blessing those computers were for the students in the Life Skills classroom.

By the time I started my sophomore year, freshmen were still attending the middle school. My mom and I sat down to build my class schedule. Allen High had recently adopted block scheduling, which was still a fairly new concept in the late '90s.

Band was already decided. That wasn't even a question.

What about my other electives? Home Economics? Sports? Yeah, right. BCIS (Business Computer Information Systems)? I was already pretty advanced with Microsoft Office.

I guess we'll sign up for... what's this? Computer Science?

Uh, okay.

I remember the first day of Computer Science. Most of my classes were on the north end of campus, so getting to Hall C was a bit of a trek. I can still smell the computers, the CRT monitors, the lockers, and whatever it was that made an old school smell like an old school.

The classroom was split almost in half. On the left were the familiar rows of student desks. The right half of the room was lined with computers around three of the walls, waiting for us to sit down and see what they could do.

The teacher, Coach Baker, seemed bigger than life.

Coach Baker

Sitting down at my desk and recognizing a few of the students around me, Coach Baker commanded the room. I couldn't tell if he was kind, grumpy, or somewhere in between. He spoke with authority, and all eyes were on him as he walked us through the syllabus.

Somewhere in there, he talked about Alaska (was that where he was from?). He had graduated from Baylor in Waco and earned the title of "Coach" by leading the Allen High School lacrosse team (what a fascinating sport). Fortunately, the similarities between him and Trunchbull ended there.

It didn't take long to realize he genuinely delighted in teaching young minds how to think thoughtfully, deeply, and well. He had this thing he did with his eyebrows, almost as if he were challenging you to stop and make sure you really believed what you had just said.

That first year, we were introduced to the fundamentals of computer science: variables, constants, primitive data types, if statements, loops, case statements, arrays, and more. Our language of the year was Turbo Pascal 7. Even today, I can picture the blue background, the simple menu bar across the top, and the yellow and white text that filled the screen.

When it came time for tests, we had to write both code and pseudocode by hand. Coach Baker had a habit of giving "trick" tests to make sure we were paying attention. One simply instructed us to write our name at the top and turn it in.

There was another lesson hidden in those tests. Your handwriting had to be legible. Mine wasn't.

So I learned to write in small caps. Decades later, it's still my handwriting.

When it came time to build my schedule for junior year, there really wasn't much of a decision to make. I signed up for Computer Science II. Not because I had discovered my future career. Far from it. If you had asked sixteen-year-old me what I wanted to do for a living, software engineer would not have even made the list. I loved Computer Science, and I thoroughly enjoyed Coach Baker's class, but I was convinced I never wanted to spend eight hours a day sitting behind a desk writing code.

The truth was much simpler. I just wanted another year in Coach Baker's classroom.

That year, we traded Turbo Pascal for a proprietary sprite-based programming language developed by 7th Level, a game development company just a couple of towns away in Richardson. If memory serves, the language was called Studio 7, although I have never been able to find much information about it since. They had also created a game called G-NOME, which had become fairly popular around North Texas. Naturally, we spent some class time playing it.

We were not just learning another programming language. He was showing us that software was something real people built. It was not confined to companies in California or names in the back of a textbook. There was a software company just down the road creating games, building tools, and making a living doing it.

By senior year, there was never any question about my schedule. Computer Science III with Coach Baker was simply where I wanted to be. By then, there was a core group of us, the same students showing up year after year. It was always good to see familiar faces walk through the door on the first day of class. We already knew what to expect from Coach Baker, and he knew what to expect from us.

This time, we graduated to Borland C++. The syntax changed. The compiler changed. The challenges grew a little more difficult. Somewhere along the way, I started noticing something that has stayed with me throughout my career.

The language kept changing.

The way you thought did not.

The Live Wire

Sometime between the end of my sophomore year and the beginning of my senior year, the school remodeled a section across from the gym and opened a new computer lab called The Live Wire.

To us, it was a techie's dream. The room was filled with modern Windows 98 PCs, all networked together and sporting technology that felt like science fiction. It was also where I signed up for a free Hotmail email address, the same one I still use today.

Do you remember when a 3.5" floppy disk held a whopping 1.44 MB? Sharing anything larger with a friend meant spanning a compressed archive across multiple floppy disks and hoping none of them failed. Well, boy howdy! The Live Wire had Iomega Zip drives. One hundred megabytes per disk, baby! I eventually bought a couple of Zip drives for home because they were just that cool.

Then there were CD burners. If you wanted to make the late '90s equivalent of a Spotify playlist, you burned your own mix CD. You just had to make sure you didn't breathe too hard around the computer while it was writing the disc, or you'd end up with another coaster.

I specifically remember sharing an album or two with a friend by ripping the original CDs into MP3s and copying them onto a Zip disk for them to take home. There's a decent chance those same MP3s are still sitting on my Plex server today.

After school, a group of us would often gather in The Live Wire and spend hours playing Quake together over the network. Before LAN gaming became commonplace, my friends and I had connected two computers together with a serial null modem cable just to play Duke Nukem. This was an entirely different world.

Our school district was serious about technology. Around the same time, Allen partnered with Collin County Community College, or "Quad C" as everyone called it back then, to offer college-level courses. If I remember correctly, students could even complete a two-year program and graduate from high school with their CCNA certification.

The Live Wire gave a bunch of computer nerds a place to tinker, learn, and have an absolute blast.

The End of Hall C

I was in the last graduating class of that campus. The next year, a new building opened, and my mom, Coach Baker, and my other beloved teachers moved their classrooms there. The memories made in those halls didn't fade.

Since my college was only twenty minutes away, I'd return frequently to visit my mom at school and swing by Coach Baker's classroom to see what he was mentoring the next batch of students. I'd just sit with them as long as they'd let me. I didn't want to leave. Even today, Coach Baker is still teaching at another local school, coaching students how to think.

My high school was demolished in 2018.

Hall C is gone. The band hall is gone. My mom's classroom in Hall D is gone. The halls where I learned to type, struggled through calculus, discovered programming, and spent countless hours are nothing more than memories now.

But the building was never the important part.

Turbo Pascal is gone. Borland C++ is gone. The proprietary language from 7th Level disappeared long ago. Even the Apple IIe and Apple IIGS that started it all belong in museums.

Twenty-five years later, the tools have changed more times than I can count. Buildings have come and gone.

What remained was learning how to think.