Mikeie Reiland is a staff writer for Education at Forbes Advisor. Before coming to Forbes Advisor, he wrote magazine journalism for publications like the Oxford American, Bitter Southerner, and Gravy.

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...