Comment by smcameron

Wow, this takes me back to 8th grade science fair in probably 1982 or 1983. I was casting about for a science project, and came across an article in Creative Computing magazine about this model, and the Limits of Growth and the Club of Rome, and I was like, "yeah, I'll make a population simulation on my Ti/994a in Extended BASIC and that'll be my science project." And so I did. I remember my model predicted population to fluctuate in a kind of sine wave pattern with some major crash in the early 2000's. I remember explaining the concept of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to the judges, and suspecting that my program was suffering a bit from GIGO. And I won in my category and went on to the state level science fair in Jackson, Mississippi, where I did win some scholarship from the Army (well, I'm not built for the army) but got beat out (justifiably) by this kid who had built a TRS-80 controlled robot. I remember being very impressed by his robot, of course, but maybe even moreso by the fact that all the silver finish was worn off his keyboard from where he'd been typing so much. It was also on that trip, during a visit to the university that I saw WordStar for the first time, and I was impressed by the automatic line breaking moving words to the next line, and I also saw some implementation of Lunar Lander on a vector graphics display for the first time.