[Yesterday: 3 miles; today: rest and travel]<\/p>\n
I graduated from high school in 1980.\u00a0 The personal computer as we know it did not exist at that time.\u00a0 There were a few things coming out.\u00a0 I remember one kid’s dad had a PET computer and the early single-board stuff existed.\u00a0 But none of that was in my sphere of operations.<\/p>\n
I went off to college at John Brown University.\u00a0 I signed up as a mechanical engineering major, mostly because that is what my dad had done and we enjoyed similar things.<\/p>\n
One of my classes was a course in computer programming.\u00a0 They had a mini-computer called a Data General Nova 4<\/a>.\u00a0 We had terminals\u00a0 (old Lear Sieglars<\/a>) in a room with some chairs.\u00a0 And the grad student(s?) had put together a shell-script-type menuing\u00a0 system which would let us edit our programs, compile, run and print the output.\u00a0 We were working in a language called Pascal.<\/p>\n Somewhere along the line someone discovered a way out of the menuing system.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I was pretty bored at John Brown, so I spent some time roaming around in the file system and discovering things.\u00a0 I had never been at a computer before, remember.\u00a0 And there were directory listings where I could see programs.\u00a0 I didn’t know what the programs were or what they did.\u00a0 So, I would get up the nerve and just run them to see what would happen.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t remember any great tragedy or even what they did.\u00a0 I do remember one occasion when I crashed the system,\u00a0 or I suspect that I did based on how it came to a screeching halt after I ran a program.\u00a0 Oops,\u00a0 don’t run that one again!\u00a0 I tried not to do these explorations when there were other students trying to complete their programming projects.<\/p>\n Many years later I wrote a menuing system in Perl for an ISP.\u00a0 That was my first introduction to Linux.\u00a0 Having seen the effects of breaking out of a menuing system, I tried particularly hard to make it air-tight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Yesterday: 3 miles; today: rest and travel] I graduated from high school in 1980.\u00a0 The personal computer as we know it did not exist at that time.\u00a0 There were a few things coming out.\u00a0 I remember one kid’s dad had a PET computer and the early single-board stuff existed.\u00a0 But none of that was in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4866"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4868,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4866\/revisions\/4868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}