I was thinking about the summer of 1973 when I first got my hands on a computer. Well physically that is. I had had my hands on a teletype terminal the year before. My high school science class used to bus down from Sonoma to Berkeley and the Lawrence Hall of Science, where for US$0.75 per hour we could program an HP-3000 in BASIC. But that following summer, I took a couple of classes at the local community college, and the math department there had a DEC PDP-8/I. And I had it all to myself. I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus and Hammurabi, and trying to learn how to write programs in FOCAL. I did get a Star Trek formulaic script writer going in BASIC, and somewhere I have a paper tape of it. Later at Cal in the basement of Evans Hall, I was introduced to adventure running on a PDP-11 under Unix. '78, '79, there abouts. I also "word processed" my papers in troff. It took until '81 until I got an Apple ][+, and I never looked back. No more timesharing, no more waiting 30 minutes or more for a printout. Ah, yes.
Posted by jim at February 3, 2003 11:33 AM