[Yesterday: 3 miles; today: rest and travel]
I graduated from high school in 1980. The personal computer as we know it did not exist at that time. There were a few things coming out. I remember one kid’s dad had a PET computer and the early single-board stuff existed. But none of that was in my sphere of operations.
I went off to college at John Brown University. I signed up as a mechanical engineering major, mostly because that is what my dad had done and we enjoyed similar things.
One of my classes was a course in computer programming. They had a mini-computer called a Data General Nova 4. We had terminals (old Lear Sieglars) in a room with some chairs. And the grad student(s?) had put together a shell-script-type menuing system which would let us edit our programs, compile, run and print the output. We were working in a language called Pascal.
Somewhere along the line someone discovered a way out of the menuing system. If you hit option “3” (for instance) and then pounded on the ESC key rapidly, it may let you out of the menu and you would have a regular operating system command line.
I was pretty bored at John Brown, so I spent some time roaming around in the file system and discovering things. I had never been at a computer before, remember. And there were directory listings where I could see programs. I didn’t know what the programs were or what they did. So, I would get up the nerve and just run them to see what would happen. I don’t remember any great tragedy or even what they did. I do remember one occasion when I crashed the system, or I suspect that I did based on how it came to a screeching halt after I ran a program. Oops, don’t run that one again! I tried not to do these explorations when there were other students trying to complete their programming projects.
Many years later I wrote a menuing system in Perl for an ISP. That was my first introduction to Linux. Having seen the effects of breaking out of a menuing system, I tried particularly hard to make it air-tight.