Comment by mmooss

2 days ago

> Kagan also allowed the teens to connect to his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine via teletype over phone lines so they could run programs written in TRAC (Text Reckoning And Compiling).

> Being able to work with computers interactively and in real time was generally unavailable to nonprofessional computer users at the time [1966].

What a game-changer and privilege. What hope did kids have to learn about computing at the time? Reading about it in books and magazines wouldn't seem to be sufficient. Did people outside the computer professionals in the special room get to use them? What about people in accounting, science, mathematics, ballistics, etc.?

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mmooss

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