In ninth grade I did not fit in, since all my classmates were new to me. The school itself treated me politically the same as everyone else, so that was not the problem. My school was the 14. jedenáctiletá střední škola in Prague 12, on Máchova near Náměstí Míru, and in the school year 1957 to 1958 I was in class 9.a. It was an eleven-year school, and the last three years — ninth, tenth and eleventh grade — were the high school part, so all of the high school material was packed into those three years.

My sister Jana went to a different high school and once in a while she skipped school to go swimming with her classmates and do other things. I thought that I could do the same.

I skipped alone. After the first few absences I did not know what to say when I came back, so I stayed away instead, and after that it only got worse.

Every morning I left home as if I were going to school. Instead of taking the streets toward Náměstí Míru I went the other way, toward the trams around Bělehradská and Bruselská, since going toward the school meant running into other students on their way there.

A tram ticket cost about sixty haléřů. I knew how to avoid paying twice by taking the tram to the end of the line and back. I rode for a few hours most mornings and then walked around Prague. The trams were cold. What I remember about those months is being cold and unhappy.

Once in a while I went to a movie, or I went to see my friend Vojta, who we called Štefek and who was often home. We mostly talked about books and about life. I think he knew that I was skipping school, but I am no longer sure of that. The rest of those days has gone blurry.

I got away with it until the end of March. I think the school assumed that I was sick, since I looked sickly anyway.

By then I was preparing to run away from home, since I was sure that my father would kill me.

A parent of someone in my class stopped at our apartment to ask how I was doing. I was not home. I came back at the normal time as if I had just come from school, and my mother confronted me and took me straight to my father in the bedroom.

There was no point in denying anything, since it was clear-cut, so I told the truth. I no longer remember what was said. What I remember is being surprised, since my father was relatively calm and I had been expecting him to be furious.

The next morning he took me to the school. I was nervous, since I did not know what was going to happen. I do not remember the meeting itself. What stayed with me was that the school president was impressed that my father had come in and told him what had happened instead of trying to cover it up.

The president gave me two choices. I could repeat ninth grade, or by the end of June I could pass written and oral examinations in every subject, separately for each semester, with the oral ones in front of the class. I took the examinations. The grades I got on them were the grades that went on my report card for the year.

My father asked the president to recommend a tutor, and the president recommended a former student of the school, Pepa. Pepa was about five years older than me, he was studying architecture, and he had received A’s all the way through high school and in architecture. He was extremely intelligent and he was an excellent teacher.

We studied at the coffee table in our living room. It was the same room where my mother met the ladies who came for fittings, and at night the two sofas in it were made into beds for me and my sister. Pepa came every school day, and as I remember it we worked from about 2:30 to 7:00 without breaks, except perhaps when my mother brought us something to eat.

Pepa did not really teach me the subjects. He taught me how to learn. It was impossible to memorize everything, so he taught me to find the fundamentals that had to be memorized and then to derive the rest quickly from that base. He also taught me how to take the examination itself. Answer what you know for certain. Work out what you can from the fundamentals, and show how you are getting there. And if you truly do not know, bluff.

I had an examination about every third day, each one in a different subject, and each one covering about half a school year at a time. I was nervous during them, including the oral ones in front of the class, though I do not remember much reaction from my classmates and there probably was not much. I was concentrating on the examination. Afterward I told Pepa what had happened, and we went straight on to the next subject.

I knew each time whether I had passed, so there was no moment at the end when I found out. Some subjects went better than others. I was doing relatively well in mathematics and the sciences, except in chemistry, which I did not like. The languages were much harder for me, and I was surprised that I passed them. But I passed everything.

At some point during the tutoring Pepa told me that he was surprised at how well I was doing. Before he started, my father had given him the impression that I was not particularly smart. I do not remember Pepa’s exact words.

At the time I knew that the method worked because I was passing the examinations. I did not understand how much it mattered until much later. I noticed it at MIT, and then in my technical work, especially at NEC, where I often had to learn difficult new material quickly and some of the documentation was written in what we jokingly called Japanese English. Between that method and what I knew about the hardware, I could work out what the operating system code was doing even when I did not have the source code.

Near the end I was running out of time, and there was an assignment in descriptive geometry, to draft a hyperbola from a formula. I was not very good at descriptive geometry, and Pepa, who was studying architecture, was extremely good at it. So that one time he did not teach me how to do it. He did it himself, and he made a beautiful drawing in colored ink with perfect lettering.

Mr. Karásek, who taught the subject, had been Pepa’s teacher too. He had been a Scout and he knew Morse code, and Pepa could not resist. Along the main axes of the hyperbola he wrote in Morse code “Karásek je vůl,” which means Karásek is an ass.

I handed the drawing in.

Karásek called me to his office and told me that if I insisted that I had drawn it, he would fail me, and that otherwise I could bring him one that I had made myself. I brought him a much worse drawing, and I passed.

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with Pepa and we talked about it again. More than sixty years later, he was still laughing about it.