For me it was Basic on the Aster (CP/M), and not much later the c64. However, I remember getting really 'drawn in' after getting the 'feedback' of what my programs did.
There's nothing that gives more feedback than Lego Mindstorms robotics; even the old sets (cheap second hands) will allow a very simple (GUI) start, and allow an upgrade path (NQC for example) which could later lead to *nix hacking.
Posted
by
Zonk
from the popular-kid-gets-snubbed dept.
coondoggie writes to mention an article at NetworkWorld about the outsider status of Ethernet in some high-speed data centers. From the article: "The latency of store-and-forward Ethernet technology is imperceptible for most LAN users -- in the low 100-millisec range. But in data centers, where CPUs may be sharing data in memory across different connected machines, the smallest hiccups can fail a process or botch data results. 'When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance,' Garrison says. This forced many data center network designers to look beyond Ethernet for connectivity options."