When I was around 13 years old (around 1978), my brother took me up a room at his college (UC Santa Cruz) that you needed a special key for, because it held one of the computer terminals spread around campus, connected to the university's DEC PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E.
It was a dark, mysterious little room, with this mysterious Datamedia terminal wish mysterious glowing characters and flashing cursor on the screen. I was fascinated.
He showed me how to play some games on it (I think the first one was 'trek', text-based of course). It was amazing, and seemed terribly high-tech and complex to my young mind.
A year later, someone at my Jr High told me about playing games on the university's computers, and I remembered that time when I'd done that; they told me how to login to the games account:
HELLO 5,5
And off I went. The first game I played was "Animal" (you know, it guesses what animal you're thinking of). I played for awhile, but then got bored and wanted to look at other games. But... I couldn't figure out how to end the game! "end"? no. "stop"? no. "quit"? no.
Frustrated, I told my friends back in Jr High, and they told me of the Magic that was "Control-C".
I went back, played more games, and decided then and there that I wanted to learn how these things worked!
I bought a Wiley Self-Teaching Guide to Basic. I bought "Introduction to Computer Logic Circuits and Boolean Logic" (or something like that). I bought "Introduction to Pascal". Off I went. I still like programming, these 37 years later, amazingly enough.
- Tim