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I started in teaching in 1973 in an institution that was mainly a teaching institution. Towards
the end of the 1970s, I moved to a university, the equivalent of your four-year universities,
but didn’t do any research for several years. I was a member of several professional organizations,
including the ACM and the Special Interest Group, SIGCSE. In 1987, I was invited to China
with a People-to-People group, which was looking at computers in education. The group was led
by Bob Aiken and the group got to be very friendly in the two years that we were —
sorry, two weeks we were together. At the end of that year, they organized a reunion
in New York and put in the form of a symposium, although it was a fairly lightweight symposium
so people could say that they were going to something professional. I saw my head of department,
who happened to have some money left over and it was the end of their financial year,
and I did tell him the sort of thing I was going to. He gave me the money and funded
my trip to that. As a result of that, I realized that if I started publishing I would be able
to get back to those reunions each year. So I started to prepare for the following year
and got my first paper published. And from there on, I published at least one or two
papers for conferences each year so I could visit the United States, even if the conferences
were elsewhere, and catch up with friends. And did that until I left the university in
1995. Along the way, the work that I had done got me started on a Ph.D., which I actually
finished in the three years following my retirement in 1995.