Quote:
Originally Posted by tjf
On that, I don't suppose I can argue. My whole goal of that hypothetical in the "50 years ago" was to ask whether the more easily accessible programming and technology would serve as more inspirational, and whether that theoretical trend would continue into the next 50.
However, you did prove very well that the tech was there. As an aside though, would a high-schooler have had access to the PDP-11 at that time? I was under the impression the PDP-11 in it's heyday was mostly sold to universities and companies, rarely high schools.
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Missed my edit. I had access to the PDP-11 at the age of 5. My friend Justin's Father worked for Xerox he had access to an early WYSIWYG protoype by age 6.
You could go to IBM school while nearly high school age and I had friends with mainframe access at Universities over modems.
So while many schools may not have had physical hardware: even Sage used phone lines to close the gap between the hardware location and the user's location.
I grew up with my Dad sitting around with a stencil at his drawing board every night. Laying out delay lines and bit slice processors. After the Air Force he designed parts of Time Tran for IT&T Telex. Think e-mail.
There were many young interns. Lots of energy. Looking for opportunity.