What was it about?

The AiS program was designed to introduce a group of students to the world of the internet, unix, email, chat, and most of all, computer programming. Over the course of the school year, a set of hand picked students from each of the participating schools would collaboratively learn in the classroom and across the internet. We were taught the basics of Unix, csh, core utilities, and programs like pine and pico. We learned how to program in FORTRAN and process data from CSV files. We learned about the early Web, Gopher, and Veronica, which we used for research and recreation. We were given dial-up accounts to a university, and were allowed to use SLIP or PPP to jack in from home. It was magical. The school year would end with a science project completed by teams of students, where they would use FORTRAN to process data, do some math, and output data. This data would then be graphed and presented in the ever familiar tri-fold science board at a fair in Nashville, TN.

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