Numbers and those who crunch them are all the rage in sports today, but as this 1959 video of the Case Institute of Technology basketball team shows, it’s nothing new. The assistant coach was an undergraduate computer wizard named Don Knuth who fed data into an IBM 650 to help improve his school’s chances. Knuth went on to become a legend in the field of computing and is currently Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. An excerpt from an interview at computer history.org in which Knuth recalls the first time he saw a computer:

“Later on in my freshman year there arrived a machine that, at first,  I could see only through the glass window. They called it a computer. I think it was actually called the IBM 650 ‘Univac.’ That was a funny name, because Univac was a competing brand. One night a guy showed me how it worked, and gave me a chance to look at the manual. It was love at first sight. I could sit all night with that machine and play with it.”