When I was 8 years old (or so, my memory isn’t very good any more), my school got access to a PDP-11 computer owned by another school 3 towns away.  We had 8 terminals running over a dedicated 2400 baud leased line, which gave us a whopping 300 baud connection at any given terminal.  At the time I couldn’t imagine needing more than 300 baud, since that was about as fast as I could read, why would anyone need more?

Being an 8 year old kid, my primary interest was playing games.  If memory serves me right, the only games available were the original Colossal Cave Adventure and a game called Skis where you had to build a business selling skis or something.  Of course I wanted more.  Someone handed me a copy of BASIC Computer Games and after hours of typing I was off and playing amazing games like Hunt the Wumpus!  Having to type in the source code was a quick jump start to learning how to program. Continue reading →