Post navigation Gisborne's Programming Challenge 4 Girls 2012 Thanks to EIT's Tair?whiti campus for hosting this year's Programming Challenge For Girls (aka "PC4G") in Gisborne.  The awesome support from Min Hu and his EIT team of Nick Thorne, Tina Blumenthal, Karen de Lautour, Eddie Ashwell, and Katy Armstrong helped make Gisborne's PC4G a successful and challenging PC4G venue for this international programming event. We can't say too much about the content of this year's challenge since it is still taking place in other locations around the world, but in chatting about each of our earlier programming days, I was reminded....  long before our first Apple ][+, even before our TRS-80 home computer (with a cassette tape as long-term storage for its whopping 4K of RAM that we later doubled to 8K!), and outside of the mainframes at Dad's work, probably my first programming experience of any sort, if my own RAM works here, was on an HP-65 that Dad brought home in 1974, the first hand-held programmable calculator: Funny how the calculator's little magnetic cards, one for each line of code, were not all that different from the Java-esque lines of code that Alice utilises for each of its drag-and-drop visual programming tiles.  See more of the HP-65, aka the "Classic Superstar", at mycalc.db.fr .   As much as things change, it's funny to see how some things really do stay the same, at least at their core. For this year's PC4G 2012, all of the teams stepped up to the