My best friend in high school went to MIT and I ... didn't (it's okay, the state college I wound up going to was about my academic speed, and I would have been

My best friend in high school went to MIT and I ... didn't (it's okay, the state college I wound up going to was about my academic speed, and I would have been toast in a couple of semesters at MIT). I also did a pilgrimage to MIT and saw the DEC-10s. Printed out a school project on the LGP, played around with a Lisp Machine for a few hours. MIT's friendly, unparanoid attitude towards people using their systems and basically just digging their technology was very formative in my career. Zork was the hook. I came to play adventure games, I stayed to learn Emacs and a bit about networking and PDP-10s, and LISP. I don't use PDP-10s anymore, but I work in the games industry, use Emacs every hour of my working day, and wish I could write more production LISP (though if you squint at Javascript just right...)