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We had a terminal to a PDP-11 70 in our middle school library in 1977 when I was 12. The terminal printed on green and white striped paper and no one at our sch

We had a terminal to a PDP-11 70 in our middle school library in 1977 when I was 12. The terminal printed on green and white striped paper and no one at our school knew how to operate it until a friend and I began to play with it. I hand-typed games from this book: https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=cover-digital https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=c... which eventually led to me writing my own programs. The actual PDP 11 was located at a local college. After learning a bit more about the architecture, we two twelve-year-olds called the administrator and asked for root privileges. Sadly, he said, "No." :-)

flyinghamster 9y ago
My high school got a PDP-11/34 when I was a sophomore (class of '82), and offered a one-week intro that summer to all interested students. I was hooked, and wound up taking programming courses in junior and senior years (BASIC as a junior, COBOL as a senior). We were running RSTS/E, with BASIC-PLUS and WATBOL. WATFOR was also available, but none of my courses used it. TECO scared me away; all I ever learned was how to load and run VTEDIT, if I were lucky enough to get one of the few VT100s. Unfortunately, most of the terminals were Visual 200s which frequently broke down and only emulated VT52. Noting my interest, my dad went out and bought an Apple II+, and mostly by keying in program listings I taught myself 6502 assembler. A Heathkit H-11 (an LSI-11 system in kit form) would have really rocked, but I had a lot of fun with the Apple just the same.
ralphc 9y ago
It was the 70's. I was in a similar situation, I just guessed bad words as passwords until I got in with "login 1 hell". My first hack :)