This is an awesome story. It almost made me cry. At the same time these guys were building illicit computers in their dorm rooms, I and my buddies were buildin

This is an awesome story. It almost made me cry. At the same time these guys were building illicit computers in their dorm rooms, I and my buddies were building illicit robots in ours. We weren't in danger from the secret police, of course, so I don't mean to directly compare the experience. But we were at a religious university that simply didn't have the ability to think broadly enough to allow for the possibility that students might have interests outside the established course work, and certainly frowned on the use of power tools in church-owned dorms. We ignored the rules, quite openly, made burn marks on the desks and left pounds of aluminum shavings in the carpets, and definitely felt rebellious doing it. In any case: the article says that these guys feel like they didn't really accomplish anything, because while they were bootlegging Sinclair Spectrum clones, Apple, on the other side of the world, was reinventing the entire computer industry. I have to disagree. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey - and these guys had quite a journey. Maybe they didn't contribute decisively to bringing down Communism; but if that's your success metric, then I think almost everybody fails. In my case, that first robot that we built - which sucked - led to a second one, that didn't. And that led to a graduate research assistantship at a different university that was more welcoming of student initiative - and that led, eventually, to a career in space robotics. It's been quite a ride, and it isn't over. And I wouldn't trade a minute of it.