The paper elaborates on programming and computing 1970 to 1983 in the Swedish upper secondary school. Articles from contemporary journals and firsthand text sources are used. During that period, programming never qualified as a separate subject; it was a tool for problem solving in engineering, economics, and mathematics, and did become a literacy subject in its own right. Early adopters of computers in education became important pioneers in the production of discourses about “how-to” and “what-to” teach. The diffusion of computer technology was substantiated in a curriculum for computing in natural sciences, which embraced programming.