My first programming experience was on a PDP-8 using BASIC. Code, run, debug in a very tight loop. I was hooked. Then in college, it was punch cards and a line

My first programming experience was on a PDP-8 using BASIC. Code, run, debug in a very tight loop. I was hooked. Then in college, it was punch cards and a line printer, with long delays while waiting for the hardware to work, and your job to work its way through the system. The very opposite of a tight loop. And then I got an IBM PC, and there was a glimmer of hope that I could recreate that early experience. But the tools were expensive, clunky, and slow. And then there was Turbo Pascal. Cheap, blindingly fast, so much fun. That’s what we were all waiting for. A fantastic product.