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As a child, maybe 10-12, I discovered a book that shaped my entire development as a human being, infusing me with the spirit of a culture with different values and different capabilities. That book: Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

Some of my most vivid memories of the book were of the exploits of a group of guys @ MIT ca. 1952, originally a model train club. Minicomputers were free from the priesthood-like stiffness of the mainframe operators. You no longer had to submit your batch of punched cards; anyone could schedule time on it, and you interacted with it in real time.

The first real directly interactive computers, long before the

This same spirit is alive and well now: the free/open source movement.

When Internet access started to become available, my dad and I had standing reservations for pretty much the max available time each week. I think I got and hour at a time? Two, max.

The PDP minicomputers were among the those at the MIT AI lab. A lot of firsts took place on this machine

Just